Foretokens

'Howe is peerless and I look at her work, happily, with awe' OCEAN VUONGA 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

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?

What unfolds is a personal Babel of voices and identities, and an examination of the contradictory legacies of colonialism, where poems – past and present – act as ‘foretokens’, omens of what lies ahead. A central spine of poems takes the molecular structure of DNA as its template: a ‘ladder of atoms beginning to twist’, down which the poet steps into the darkness of time. Objects of witness resurface to tell their own stories: fragile porcelains of past centuries transiting across continents; a picture calendar of old postcards from another world.

‘From the other side of ruin / we found safe passage’, Howe writes in these spectacular poems of emotional heft and quickening wit, their voice salvaged from the fragments of a former self. Foretokens is a monumental work of survival and creation, turning over what is left behind as it strikes out towards astonishing new vistas.

• | Author: Sarah Howe
• | Publisher: Vintage Publishing
• | Publication Date: Oct 02, 2025
• | Number of Pages:
• | Language:
• | Binding: Paperback / softback
• | ISBN-13: 9781784746131
• | ISBN-10: 1784746134