Heirloom - by Catherine-Esther Cowie (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2025
Shortlisted for the Forward (Jerwood) Prize for Best First Collection 2025
A Poetry Book Society Commendation

'How the noise in my head grows and grows,
splinters into phantoms and shapes,

graceless muses for her cot-mobile.
How I terror.'

Moving from colonial to post-colonial St Lucia, this debut collection brings to light the inheritances of four generations of women, developing monologues, lyrics and narrative poems which enable us to see how past dysfunction, tyranny and terror structure the shapes of women's lives, and what they hand down to one another.

Uneasy inheritances are just the starting point for this debut's remarkable meditations: Should the stories of the past be told? Do they bring redemption or ruin? What are the costs of saying what happened? Beguiling and cathartic, Catherine-Esther Cowie's powerful, formally inventive poems reckon with the past even as they elegise and celebrate her subjects.

Review Quotes

'The haunting of ancestry is both a gift and a terror in the blood in Catherine-Esther Cowie's stunning debut collection, Heirloom, that is peopled by the brilliantly embodied personages of four generations of women. These are beautiful, difficult poems of liberation by a specially gifted poet.' - Kwame Dawes

'Heirloom is a determined "unforgetting" as "this arm muscling towards memory" relates, in unapologetic post-modernist style.' - John R. Lee

About the Author

Catherine-Esther Cowie was born in St Lucia to a Tobagonian father and a St Lucian mother. She migrated with her family to Canada and then to the USA. Her poems have been published in PN Review, Prairie Schooner, West Branch Journal, The Common, SWWIM, Rhino Poetry and others. She is a Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop fellow.