Books

 

 

 

FORETOKENS (2025)

Forthcoming 2 October, 2025

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.

 

 

 


‘Rich and fierce, Sarah Howe’s poems are alive to the complex stories and voices that cohere around objects, family and place. This is a magnificent collection, surprising and moving in equal measure – I loved it’
– Edmund de Waal

 

‘A wonderful first collection – it isn’t often you can say exquisite, original, erudite and adventurous all in one breath. Sarah Howe goes to the very heart of her own, her mother’s and China’s recent past’
– Ruth Padel

 

‘Sarah Howe's soulful poems are as vivid as a river flowing through the Chinese landscape, as alive as mothers calling to their children’
– Xinran

 

 

Loop of Jade (2015)

Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize
Winner of The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award
Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection
Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize
A Book of the Year in the TLS, Observer, Independent & New Statesman

There is a Chinese proverb that says: ‘It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters.’ But geese, like daughters, know the obligation to return home. In her exquisite first collection, Sarah Howe explores a dual heritage, journeying back to Hong Kong in search of her roots.

With extraordinary range and power, the poems build into a meditation on hybridity, intermarriage and love – what meaning we find in the world, in art, and in each other. Crossing the bounds of time, race and language, this is an enthralling exploration of self and place, of migration and inheritance, and introduces an unmistakable new voice in British poetry.


Read a sample poem...

Read about the story behind the book...

 

Press: Loop of Jade

‘One of the very best books of poems I have read for a long time — complicated and moving and very accomplished’
– A.S. Byatt, New Statesman

 

‘Thoughtful, agile, erudite...  sprinkled throughout are minute observations that make the everyday seem magic. After reading Loop of Jade, the world seems larger and more nuanced than ever before, one of the most wonderful experiences I’ve had reading a contemporary poetry collection’
– Charlotte Runcie, Daily Telegraph

 

‘poems of such sustained depth, maturity and beauty that it is hard not to be convinced of her genuine and lasting talent’
– Andrew Holgate, The Sunday Times

 

‘an ambitious and erudite debut (one poem references Homer, Roethke and Horace), exploring the poet’s Chinese heritage in supple, inventive lines’
– Suzi Feay, Independent, Books of the Year

 

‘Loop of Jade is one of the best first collections I've read in recent years’
– William Wootten, Poetry Review

 

‘the poems in Loop of Jade ...move me in profound and previously unimaginable ways’
– Emma-Lee Moss, Guardian

 

‘this is a jewel of a book’
– Victoria Kennefick, WILD COURT

 

‘a sinuous, shimmering, mirage-like debut collection’
– Roger Cox, THE SCOTSMAN

 

‘Absolutely amazing...Sarah Howe's Loop of Jade shone with its startling exploration of gender and injustice through place and identity, its erudition, and powerful imagery as well as her daring experiment with form. She brings new possibilities to British poetry’
– Pascale Petit, Chair of the T.S. Eliot Prize judges

 

‘a significant literary talent, a very special writer indeed’
– Sarah Waters, Young Writer of the Year Award judge, in The Bookseller

 

‘Howe is a poet who sees through things, both revealing what’s underneath, and using the barriers to sight to imagine a clearer picture. Her vision is one I think utterly necessary in British poetry now’
– Hugh Foley, The Oxonian Review

 

‘Her range is vast — from early imperial China to the aftershocks of Tiananmen to the case of Pound, jailed as a traitor in Italy, starting to write what became known as the Pisan Cantos...This is a dazzling debut whose impact will most likely be fully registered only after some years’
– Maureen McLane, Vela

 

More reviews & essays:
Loop of Jade

Dave Coates, Dave Poems

Kate Potts, Poetry International

Gail Low, Dundee University Review of the Arts

Charlie Place, The Worm Hole

Eric Karl Anderson, The Lonesome Reader

 

Selected Bibliography: Academic Articles & Chapters


Lorraine Lau, ‘Between Language and Silence: Self-Writing Diasporic Identity in Sarah Howe’s Loop of Jade’, Hong Kong Studies, 4 ( 2024), 37–56.

Jennifer Wong, ‘Sarah Howe: Pilgrimage, Chinoiserie, and Translated Identities’, Identity, Home and Writing Elsewhere in Contemporary Chinese Diaspora Poetry (Bloomsbury, 2024), pp. 83–92. 

Luo Hui, ‘Line, Loop, Constellation: Classical Chinese Poetry Between Sinophone and Anglophone Worlds’ in A World History of Chinese Literature, ed. Yingjin Zhang (Routledge, 2023), pp. 62–73.

Cosima Bruno, ‘Translation in a Multilingual Context: Six Authors Writing the City’, in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature in Translation, ed. Cosima Bruno, Lucas Klein and Chris Song (Bloomsbury, 2023), pp. 319-331.

Lucas Klein, ‘Inside the History of the World: Syntheses of Literary Form between Prose Poetry and China’, PMLA, 138 (2023), 666-681.

Yasna Bozhkova, ‘Intercultural and Intertextual Crossings in Sarah Howe’s Loop of Jade’, Sillages Critiques, 32 (2022).

Antony Huen, ‘The “Old Hong Kong” and “A Gold-Sifting Bird”: Hong Kong and Chinese Ekphrasis in Contemporary British Poetry’, Wasafiri, 37 (2022), 13–21. 

Peter McDonald, ‘Sarah Howe: Artefacts of Writing’, Great Writers Inspire: University of Oxford (2020).  

Mary-Jean Chan,‘“Journeying is Hard”: Difficulty, Race and Poetics in Sarah Howe’s Loop of Jade’, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry 12 (2020), 1–29. 

Jennifer Wong, ‘Hannah Lowe and Sarah Howe: Multicultural Heritage and Questions of Identity’, English, 69 (2020), 246–269. 

Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, ‘Something Sets Us Looking for a Place: Poetry of Jennifer Wong and Sarah Howe’, Wasafiri, 32 (2017), 41–45.

Carol Rumens, ‘Poem of the week: Yangtze by Sarah Howe’, The Guardian, (2016).

 

 

 

Pamphlet

 

 

 


A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia (2009)

Sarah Howe’s debut offers great range – a series of poetic endeavours which nourish and reward. Some of the work here reflects her dual heritage – in one longer piece, she describes travelling to China and Hong Kong to trace her mother’s roots. She also offers imagistic shorter poems and edgier forays into more experimental terrain. She is a poet of place, from the limited landscapes of bed to the grand vistas of exploration.

 

‘Sarah Howe has, in her terms, “crossed the imaginary line” between the personal and the political, between the Occident and the Orient...between the real state of arrival and the dream state of pursuit.’
– Daljit Nagra

 

 

 

Translations

 

 


Real (2024)

Poetry Book Society Translation Choice

Karin Karakașlı’s highly cinematic poems are powered by music, metaphor and a fascination for the mechanics of language itself. This new selection brings together poems from Karakașlı’s 15-year career, vividly translated into English by translator and writer Canan Marașligil working with British poet Sarah Howe.

 An acclaimed writer in multiple genres as well as a journalist and academic, Karin Karakașlı has repeatedly turned to poetry to chart complex emotional geographies – both her own and those of her country, Turkey. Her highly cinematic poems are powered by music, metaphor and a fascination for the mechanics of language itself. Running through her work is a deeply held belief in the emancipatory potential of words. 

Following on from her 2017 chapbook History-Geography, this new selection brings together poems from Karakașlı’s 15-year career, vividly translated into English by translator and writer Canan Marașligil working with British poet Sarah Howe. The Poetry Translation Centre’s World Poet Series showcases the most exciting living poets from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.

 

‘The poems in Real are poems of rare imaginative courage... I read in these poems both escapist savvy and clear-sighted defiance. There is also the promise that we who survive in this world might also remake it’
– Fran Lock

 

‘This wonderful selection from Karin Karakaşlı’s work over the last fifteen years establishes her as an important contemporary poet of witness. Coruscating and sardonic by turn, her verse yet seems to deprecate its own hard-won wisdom.’
– Fiona Sampson

 

‘Canan Marasligil and Sarah Howe’s translation taps into the vulnerability of “fugitive souls” and the resilience of “endless transformations” in which Karakaşlı’s astonishing poems pay homage to and thrive on’
– Kit Fan

 

 

 

 


History-Geography (2017)

History-Geography offers for the first time in English a chapbook-length selection of poems by Armenian-Turkish poet Karin Karakaşlı, translated by Canan Marasligil, working with Sarah Howe, on behalf of the Poetry Translation Centre.