Foretokens

by Sarah Howe

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

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 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

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published October 2, 2025

About the author

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 poetry is precisely painted and aesthetically striking, often grappling with, and delighting in, problems of cultural identity and representation. Like Kei Miller’s explorations of hybridity and cross-cultural identities, Howe’s poetry is inventive, erudite and highly playful, engaging the reader with its passion for language’s intrigues and inadequacies. Howe’s first book Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best first collection in 2015.

Sarah Howe studied for her BA, MPhil and PhD at the University of Cambridge, also spending a year as a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard. In her academic work, she has a particular interest in visual qualities in Renaissance literature and in the psychology of visual perception. Until 2015 she was a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where she taught Renaissance literature. In 2015-16, she will be a Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute. She is the founding editor of <>i>Prac Crit, an online journal of poetry and criticism.

(from http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net...)

Reviews

[joy彡 · Rating 5 out of 5]

intelligent + so many good lines

[W.S. Luk · Rating 4 out of 5]

"...I listened like/a mother/in a story, like listening could make it/right."

Ceramics and childbirth are amongst the motifs that Howe employs in FORETOKENS, which revolves around the idea of predecessors and genesis. This might manifest in Howe meditating on her relationship with her mother and her Chinese-British identity, or how themes of cultural commingling or control manifest in the history of art, particularly in the wonderful series of ekphrastic poems "In the Chinese Ceramics Gallery". The "Songs Spun of Us" and "Undersong" poem series take a more experimental turn, using unconventional formatting to depict genetic sequences, while other pieces see Howe responding to literary predecessors like Milton, Borges, and Cao Xueqin, or excerpting verse out of preexisting texts like Hong Kong's Basic Law. Agile and imaginative, FORETOKENS is a worthy followup to themes Howe has established in LOOP OF JADE.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first two poems misled me. I thought it would be a pretty middling collection but it soon proved itself to be an incredibly accomplished, complex, and technically impressive work. The joy of play comes through in Howe's skill with form despite heavy themes of maternal anxiety, colonial grief, and "ancestral pain".