Poetry Club: Sarah Howe

Poetry Club welcomes the acclaimed Hong Kong-born British poet Sarah Howe to The Coronet Theatre for a remarkable evening of poetry. Howe will be reading from her extraordinary new collection Foretokens (Chatto & Windus).

Unearthed from a clear-out, a picture calendar becomes the starting point for Foretokens, a landmark new collection that returns to the riddle of belonging explored in Howe’s award-winning debut, Loop of Jade. At its heart lies her 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. Moving across continents, languages and generations, the poems form a personal Babel of voices and identities, where objects of witness recur – fragile porcelains, old postcards, family artefacts – and poems act as ‘foretokens’: omens that gesture towards both historical reckoning and future possibility.

At once intellectually agile and emotionally devastating, Foretokens has been hailed as a monumental work of survival and creation, turning over what is left behind as it strikes out towards astonishing new vistas.

“Thoughtful, agile, erudite. . . observations that make the everyday seem magic” – Charlotte Runcie, Daily Telegraph

“Howe is peerless and I look at her work, happily, with awe” – Ocean Vuong

Additional poet to be announced.

Sarah Howe

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.