Babel's Drift

It is rare to witness a decade of poetic genius with the turn of a page. In Babel’s Drift by T.S. Eliot Award winner Sarah Howe, we can.

Oscillating between Hong Kong and Great Britain, between a mother’s uncertain past and a daughter’s questioning present, Babel’s Drift introduces T.S. Eliot Award winner Sarah Howe to an American audience. For the first time, Howe’s two powerhouse collections appear in a single volume to recount an immigrant daughter’s search for belonging. In Loop of Jade, Howe investigates her family’s origin story—a mother abandoned at birth in communist China—through chinoiserie, Chinese fables, and Greek myth. Ten years later in Foretokens, Howe, now a mother herself, uses erasure, ekphrasis, and the patterning of DNA’s double helix to ponder: Is what we’ve been given all that we have to give? Profound and empathic, Babel’s Drift proves that everything must mutate to survive its own genealogy.