Foretokens

'Howe is peerless and I look at her work, happily, with awe' OCEAN VUONGWINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION 2026 SHORTLISTED FOR THE T.S. ELIOT PRIZE 2025A 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