Loop of Jade

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, author of The Good Women of China

[A] sinuous, shimmering, mirage-like debut collection

Roger Cox, Scotsman

The poems in Loop of Jade…move me in profound and previously unimaginable ways

Emma Lee Moss, Guardian

Mature and accomplished... Loop of Jade is one of the best first collections I've read in recent years

Poetry Review

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, Books of the Year 2015

A glittering debut exploring dual British and Chinese heritage with beauty and wit

Charlotte Runcie, Daily Telegraph, Editor's Choice

Thoughtful, agile, erudite... [Howe] has a knack for sound and rhyme so delicious you want to say the lines aloud just to feel your tongue around them. And 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. Howe more than holds her own among the heavyweights in a memorable year for new poetry, a year in which poets took our accepted ideas of race, heritage and tradition and blew them wide open.

Charlotte Runcie, Daily Telegraph

Remarkable.

John Walsh, Independent

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

The poems literally glisten… The evocative and unique poems are a joy.

Michael Conaghan, Belfast Telegraph

[Howe] shows that new voices can still carry their own unique freight of subtle music married to acute intelligence..

William Boyd, Guardian

[An] exquisite first collection… With extraordinary range and power, the poems build into a meditation on hybridity, intermarriage and love… An unmistakable new voice in British poetry.

Asian Art Newspaper, Book of the Year