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Heirloom
Finalist for the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry 2026
Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2026
Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2025
Shortlisted for the Forward (Jerwood) Prize for Best First Collection 2025
Shortlisted for the OCM Bocas Lit Prize for Caribbean Literature 2026
Longlisted for the Jhalak Poetry Prize 2026
A California Review of Books Best Poetry Book of 2025
A Poetry Book Society Commendation'How the noise in my head grows and grows,
splinters into phantoms and shapes,graceless muses for her cot-mobile.
How I terror.'Moving from colonial to post-colonial St Lucia, this debut collection brings to light the inheritances of four generations of women, developing monologues, lyrics and narrative poems which enable us to see how past dysfunction, tyranny and terror structure the shapes of women's lives, and what they hand down to one another.Uneasy inheritances are just the starting point for this debut's remarkable Should the stories of the past be told? Do they bring redemption or ruin? What are the costs of saying what happened? Beguiling and cathartic, Catherine-Esther Cowie's powerful, formally inventive poems reckon with the past even as they elegise and celebrate her subjects.
Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2026
Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2025
Shortlisted for the Forward (Jerwood) Prize for Best First Collection 2025
Shortlisted for the OCM Bocas Lit Prize for Caribbean Literature 2026
Longlisted for the Jhalak Poetry Prize 2026
A California Review of Books Best Poetry Book of 2025
A Poetry Book Society Commendation'How the noise in my head grows and grows,
splinters into phantoms and shapes,graceless muses for her cot-mobile.
How I terror.'Moving from colonial to post-colonial St Lucia, this debut collection brings to light the inheritances of four generations of women, developing monologues, lyrics and narrative poems which enable us to see how past dysfunction, tyranny and terror structure the shapes of women's lives, and what they hand down to one another.Uneasy inheritances are just the starting point for this debut's remarkable Should the stories of the past be told? Do they bring redemption or ruin? What are the costs of saying what happened? Beguiling and cathartic, Catherine-Esther Cowie's powerful, formally inventive poems reckon with the past even as they elegise and celebrate her subjects.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
Published June 26, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 9, 2026
4.5 stars
I read this for day 8 of the Sealey challenge 2026 (if you don’t know what Sealey is - check out there insta but it’s basically 31 poetry/verse books in the 31 days in August).
Powerful!
Standout poems for me: Manman:Tifi, The War, Body Talk, Mimorian, The Outside Child, Still I Listen For News Of Your Breaking ——.
I read this for day 8 of the Sealey challenge 2026 (if you don’t know what Sealey is - check out there insta but it’s basically 31 poetry/verse books in the 31 days in August).
Powerful!
Standout poems for me: Manman:Tifi, The War, Body Talk, Mimorian, The Outside Child, Still I Listen For News Of Your Breaking ——.
June 27, 2025
Powerful book that uses poetry to discuss what is inherited that isn’t material possessions . A heavy read, but a good one.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews