Babel's Drift

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.