Foretokens

Author: Sarah Howe

Format: Paperback

'Howe is peerless and I look at her work, happily, with awe' — Ocean Vuong

A landmark new collection from T. S. Eliot Prize-winner Sarah Howe, navigating the complex inheritance of family, language and colonialism - and forming a portrait of a mother in search of her past and herself.

'Unearthed in a clear-out, a picture calendar she's kept
- hoarding, I've learnt, is a mark of the emigrant -
across continents and time.'

So begins Sarah Howe's extraordinary new collection, returning to the riddle of belonging she explored in her award-winning debut, Loop of Jade. At the heart is her own mother's clouded past: abandoned as a baby and taken in, at the turbulent dawn of Communist China, by a woman with her own hidden motives.

Now a mother herself, Howe finds herself re-examining this unreliable narrative with fresh sight. Sifting through her own history, the poet asks, how can a new generation transform a shattered inheritance? And what is lost and gained in the pursuit?

Foretokens is a monumental work of survival and creation, turning over what is left behind as it strikes out towards astonishing new vistas.

'Foretokens arrives . . . as a kind of literary event . . . It's a work of supreme concision. Not a word is out of place' — Lucy Thynne, Telegraph

About the Author

Sarah Howe is a British poet, academic and editor. Born in Hong Kong to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England as a child. Her pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia, won an Eric Gregory Award, and her first collection, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. In 2014, she co-founded Prac Crit, an online journal of poetry and criticism. She is currently the Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus and an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Liverpool.

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