Foretokens

'Sarah Howe’s poetry is as luminous as beams of morning light, as precise as a surgical knife, as emotional as a personal confession, and as narratively enthralling as a fairy tale of old'

Xiaolu Guo, author of Once Upon a Time in the East

'Sarah Howe's Foretokens extends her intergenerational investigations with quiet candour, tracing patterns across memory, laundry, porcelain, genes, and languages to reconstruct loss and selfhood. The collection senses "another version/ of the past then unwriting itself," navigating from childbirth to bereavement through poems that function as formal contortions—thinking and unthinking cliché, twisting the lines to expose the fragility of our past and present'

Kit Fan, author of Diamond Hill

'Sarah Howe’s Foretokens is the best kind of book—undefinable and capacious. Howe’s language and poems are labyrinthian, where the frame of a maze and the wandering and re-wandering seems essential, perhaps more essential than what’s discovered. I’m struck by the variety of formal engagements in this book of beautifully thoughtful, re-thoughtful, and thought-through poems. I’m so grateful for the ridges of Howe’s mind and how lucky we get to follow its delicate and rigorous curvatures through history, lineage, motherhood, art, and so much more. What remains after grief? Nothing corporeal, but perhaps the vapor of inheritance: "I am not immune/to this mania this malaise/this inherited dream/of an archive/so complete nothing/could ever hurt again'

Victoria Chang, author of OBIT and With My Back to the World

'What a capacious tapestry of textures, sound, and a restless quest toward formal possibility. Beyond the many vital themes and questions this book crosses, every poem is wrought with a deeply considered celebration of poetry itself - what it might do, what it might breach, and who it is for. Howe is peerless and I look at her work, happily, with awe'

Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds

'Reading Foretokens is like reading liquid. The lines spill differently on each page, forming undersongs, lullabies, diptychs, erasures and notes of all kinds. Here is a waterfall. Here is a mother. Here is her ghost. "I recently resolved never again / to make a poem from another’s pain", writes Sarah Howe, a line that stopped me. These poems articulate the life-cycle of a fragment with a resonance shared across species boundaries, by "flukes and failures" alike’

Bhanu Kapil

'I read Foretokens with tears streaming down my face, howling with resonance, laughing, too, because I had always thought Sarah Howe a genius and here was the proof. Without her poetry, I would know myself less'

Emma Lee Moss