Babel's Drift - by Sarah Howe (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Two award-winning collections by Sarah Howe reveal a singular poetic voice navigating family, history, and cultural inheritance across continents and generations.

Crossing the boundaries of time, race, and language, the singular oeuvre of Sarah Howe establishes her as one of Britain's essential contemporary poets. For the first time, her two books, Foretokens and Loop of Jade--collected in this unique double volume as Babel's Drift--introduces Howe's work to an American readership. Read together as a single, monumental work of survival and creation, they form an enthralling meditation on storytelling and myth--what we inherit, and what we may choose not to pass on.

A sensation upon its UK publication in 2015, Loop of Jade became the first debut collection to win the T.S. Eliot Prize. In poems of emotional depth and quickening wit, Howe explored her dual heritage, journeying back to Hong Kong in search of her roots. Ten years later, Foretokens revisits this "personal Babel" of family relationships, confronting anew the contorting legacies of colonialism.

At the heart of Babel's Drift is Howe's mother's clouded past: abandoned as a baby and taken in, at the turbulent dawn of Communist China, by a woman whose motives remain a mystery. After becoming a mother herself, Howe returns to this unreliable family narrative with fresh perspective. Sifting through her own history, she asks how a new generation might transform a shattered inheritance--and what may be lost and gained in the process.

Review Quotes

Praise for Sarah Howe

"What a capacious tapestry of textures, sound, and a restless quest toward formal possibility."--Ocean Vuong

"Reading Foretokens is like reading liquid."--Bhanu Kapil

"there is now an anger in Howe's tonal range, which brings a pleasing sharpness to her investigations"--Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian

"Not a word is out of place"--Lucy Thynne, The Telegraph

"[Foretokens] explores the death of a father, the beginning of motherhood, and Howe's eternal subject: language itself."--Telegraph Books of the Year

"Rich and fierce, Sarah Howe's poems are alive to the complex stories and voices that cohere around objects, family and place."--Edmund De Waal

"Howe's poetry curls on the page in wonderful shapes and expressions, operating from a joyful-in-spite-of-itself fascination with form."--Heather Irvine, NuVoices

"Foretokens is itself a gallery of beautiful objects and deserves to be treasured."--John Field, T.S. Eliot Prize Review

"Thoughtful, agile, erudite...sprinkled throughout are minute observations that make the everyday seem magic."--Charlotte Runcie, Daily Telegraph

About the Author

Sarah Howe is a British poet, critic, and editor. Her first book, 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. It was named a Book of the Year by the TLS, Observer, Independent, and New Statesman. Her second collection, Foretokens (Chatto & Windus, 2025), was a Poetry Book Society Choice, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes, and named a Book of the Year by The Guardian, The Telegraph, the Financial Times, and the TLS.

Born in Hong Kong to an English father and a Chinese mother, Howe moved to England as a child. Her pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia (Tall-lighthouse, 2009), won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. In 2018, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Her work has appeared in journals and publications including POETRY, the London Review of Books, the TLS, The Paris Review Daily, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, the Financial Times, The Poetry Review, and Poetry London. She has performed her work at the Hay, Cheltenham, and Edinburgh festivals, as well as at festivals internationally and on BBC Radio. She was one of the founding editors of Prac Crit, an online journal of poetry and criticism.

Her honors include a Hawthornden Fellowship, the Harper-Wood Studentship for English Poetry, and fellowships from Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She is a trustee of the Griffin Foundation and, with Sandeep Parmar, co-hosts the London Review of Books podcast Poetry and the Turning World. She taught poetry and creative writing for many years at King's College London and is now an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Liverpool, Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus, and lives in London.