# Foretokens

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/sarah-howe/foretokens/9781529957600

![Foretokens](https://quivercdn.com/covers/vintage-digital/sarah-howe/foretokens_978-15-2995-760-0-11fb63dc.jpg?v=2026-09-24%2004%3A49%3A39)

- Book: [Foretokens](https://www.bookquiver.com/sarah-howe/foretokens) ([Foretokens.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/sarah-howe/foretokens.md))
- Authors: [Sarah Howe](https://www.bookquiver.com/sarah-howe)
- Publisher: vintage_digital
- Medium: ebook
- ISBN: 978-15-2995-760-0
- Published: 2025-10-02
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: E-book

## Description

'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 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.