Foretokens

Sarah Howe

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Paperback

Forthcoming
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English

Chatto & Windus
02 November 2025

Poetry by individual poets

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?

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.

By: Sarah Howe
Imprint: Chatto & Windus
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 135mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 300g
ISBN: 9781784746131
ISBN 10: 1784746134
Pages: 128
Publication Date: 02 November 2025
Audience: General/trade , College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

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.