with flooded goldif I should breakplease usethe big fuck-offiron staples lashingfast the clefthalves of this mothership of a chinasoup tureenhidden awayin the museum store.Backstage hereyou realise how muchcan go wrong.The pieces stillbornfrom the kiln –pattern buckling, neckkinked, a lip’s glazedribbling unwipedor the warp of a saucerfused foreverto the rough wombof an earthenware wastermeant to protect itfrom harm.In the shadow museumof flukes and failuresit’s strangely surgicalthe tacked fault linecicatrised acrossthe bulge of this bowl,her emptied belly.Sistervessel of earthI think I knowwhat you endured.
Forget repair
Sarah Howe
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“Forget repair” from FORETOKENS: by Sarah Howe.
Published by Chatto and Windus on February 10, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 by Sarah Howe.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Photo:
Marc Lixenberg
Marc Lixenberg
Sarah Howe is a British poet, academic and editor. Born in Hong Kong to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England as a child. Her pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia, won an Eric Gregory Award, and her first collection, Loop of Jade (Chatto Poetry, 2015), won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Foretokens (Chatto Poetry, 2025) is her second collection and is the Poetry Book Society’s Winter Choice. In 2014, she co-founded Prac Crit, an online journal of poetry and criticism. She is currently the Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus and an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Liverpool.
A landmark new collection from T. S. Eliot Prize-winner Sarah Howe, navigating the complex inheritance of family, language and colonialism – and forming a portrait of a mother in search of her past and herself.
"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
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