Foretokens

A new mother reckons with the inheritance of family, language and colonialism in the stunning new collection from T.S. Eliot prizewinner Sarah Howe

Foretokens is the much-anticipated follow up to a beloved prize-winning debut and a book of hard-won insight and mesmerising beauty. Here are poems salvaged from the depths of early motherhood, a voice pieced together from the fragments of a former self. In turn, Howe revisits her relationship with her own mother, and reckons with the contorting inheritance of colonialism.

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 deep time. A suite of poems follows delicate porcelains of past centuries in their transit across continents; a worker assembles iPhones on a factory line in Shenzhen; a dying father flails at his lost Empire- these breathtaking poems interrogate the transnational webs of history, gendered labour and global capitalism, and our complicity in them. Throughout, the sonic richness and intellectual agility praised in Loop of Jade, returns with a new-found force and directness.