New Books Network | Sarah Howe on "Foretokens"
Podcast: New Books Network
Date: March 27, 2026
Host: Luke
Guest: Sarah Howe, poet and author of "Foretokens" (Random House, 2025)
Episode Overview
This episode features an in-depth conversation between host Luke and poet Sarah Howe about her long-awaited poetry collection, Foretokens. The discussion explores central themes of hoarding and collecting, transgenerational trauma, the blurred lines between the archive and the horde, and the ethics and emotional costs of writing about family history. Howe reads and discusses poems from the volume, unpacking their nuances around family, identity, colonial legacies, language, and the challenges and responsibilities of poetic representation.
Key Discussion Points & Insights
1. Hoarding, Collecting, and Family Legacy
[01:31 – 11:16]
- Howe reflects on her upbringing in Watford after her family moved from Hong Kong, sharing memories of her mother's intense hoarding (“Anything with words on it, letters, newspapers. She has an entire basement full of news copies of The Times from 20 years ago.” — Howe, 03:46).
- The family dynamic becomes a “frontier war” between her Chinese mother and English father over hoarded spaces.
- She connects her mother's compulsions to traumas of abandonment and hardship (“…a woman who spent her life constitutionally unable to throw things away, who was herself quite possibly thrown away…” — Howe, 06:33).
2. Cultural Stereotypes and Trauma
[04:09 – 06:34]
- The conversation tackles stereotypes around “Chinese hoarders” and material scarcity, referencing Chinese artist Song Dong's installation "Waste Not" (created from his own mother’s hoarded possessions).
- Howe acknowledges historical roots but notes that contemporary research separates hoarding from trauma, though “it’s hard not to connect it” in her mother’s case.
3. The Archive vs. the Horde
[08:19 – 10:59]
- Howe contemplates her own collecting/archival impulses as parallel to her mother’s hoarding, especially regarding family history and memory.
- “A collector is just a hoarder with the space and the means to pursue their compulsion…” — Howe, 08:29.
- She describes trying to clear space in her parents’ attic, throwing out her disintegrated childhood toys, and her mother’s furious, symbolic response: snipping up her own childhood photographs (11:52).
- “There was something sort of vengeful on the part of her, but also maybe that she was trying to communicate something symbolically…” — Howe, 12:30.
4. Pain, Loss, and the Dream of the Archive
[13:19 – 17:16]
- Howe unpacks the collection's closing lines: “this inherited dream of an archive so complete nothing could ever hurt again”.
- She ties hoarding to a desire for psychic protection—a retreat or “barricade” from pain and loss, likening her mother to the Chinese moon goddess Chang’e (15:07).
- She positions the poet as both archivist and sorter—“My duty is to do the sorting and the ordering and the deciding what's important and what's not.” — Howe, 16:23.
5. Embracing Mess and Chaos in Poetry
[17:16 – 18:25, 20:44 – 21:52]
- Howe emphasizes that the book’s structure deliberately preserves “mess and chaos,” with thematic threads only coalescing late in the volume.
- “I wanted the reader to have an experience of all the book’s miscellaneous threads not starting to cohere until quite late on. At which point it feels like you’re starting to pick up signal, I suppose.” — Howe, 17:09.
- Luke observes that her poetry resists the “numbness” or “flattening” that can come from too much order, holding “several threads in suspension at once.”
6. The Work of Telling Painful Stories
[23:17 – 32:59]
- Howe discusses the poem “Foremother”, written to frame her grandmother’s history and the device “if it helps”, which conveys both irony and comfort.
- She reveals her grandmother was a sex worker, sold by her family—an elemental family trauma relayed “hilariously in passing” by her mother (25:11).
- The poem’s use of slashes represents “uncertainty,” reflecting the paucity of facts.
- Howe interrogates the ethics of making poetry from others’ suffering, citing the self-contradictory line: “I recently resolved never again to make a poem for another’s pain.”
- She notes how the act of writing and selling these stories is itself ethically complex: “...by the time it recurs...I intended it to have a much wider valence and one that would incriminate me, the idea that her story is being commercialized and sold by me to a reading public.” — Howe, 30:23.
7. Family, Privacy, and Poet’s Responsibilities
[32:59 – 40:11]
- Howe details the process of showing manuscripts to her parents, drawing boundaries on privacy—refusing, for example, to share photographs that are referenced in the poems but never published.
- With her children, she is especially careful to avoid “overexposure,” writing them as “quite generic” figures and ending that phase as they grow older and become “agents and actors” (39:45).
8. Genetics, Mixed Race Identity, and Childhood Racism
[41:25 – 45:16]
- Howe reads the poem “Epic”, which threads reflections on her daughter’s racialized inheritance, comments about physical appearance, and her own experiences of childhood racism (“This personal babel chromosomal riddle…”).
- The poem’s drafting process mirrors lived experience: “Originally the poem ended before the leap back to my childhood...that must have come in around draft four or five…” — Howe, 44:11.
- The conversation explores how these private and social experiences are “difficult...in multiple directions”.
9. The Political in the Personal
[45:45 – 52:35]
- Howe notes a shift from overt to more covert political engagement since her previous book, Loop of Jade, with domestic dynamics (especially with her father) mirroring colonial power structures.
- “...my parents’ marriage was very much a colonial situation in that sense” — Howe, 47:29.
- Language is an “immediate and fraught” site of power—her mother’s ambivalence about raising Howe bilingual, and her father’s angry resistance to being “excluded” by Cantonese/Mandarin conversations at home (50:45).
10. The Emotional Cost of Poetry
[53:02 – 55:46]
- On “what a poem costs,” Howe describes the “exhaustion” and even illness she feels after reading certain poems in public.
- “A book, reading [a] poem like that out loud on a stage and sharing it with a room is enough to almost make me ill, actually.” — Howe, 54:40.
- Long gaps between books correspond not just to life demands but the “draining” nature of reckoning with and exposing family pain.
11. Poetry vs. Memoir or Fiction as Family Archive
[59:10 – 61:44]
- Howe muses on alternative genres:
- Memoir would be limited by scant material—“If I were to attempt to write a researched nonfiction book, it would be 20 pages long. There’s just so little that survives about my grandmother.” — Howe, 59:36.
- Fiction seems unethical: “I would find something almost distasteful about reconstructing my grandmother’s life in technicolor detail.” — Howe, 61:22.
- Poetry, with its embrace of “gaps and silences,” offers a “more appropriate and respectful way” to approach irrecoverable family histories.
Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments
- “A collector is just a hoarder with the space and the means to pursue their compulsion in a way.” — Sarah Howe [08:29]
- “There was some sort of trauma being worked through... the years of hardship following the Cultural Revolution... the idea of always having to have something to hand... in case catastrophe struck once again.” — Sarah Howe [05:51]
- “Me throwing away those boxes was like me cutting up these pictures of her early life. I don’t know if that’s right... but I felt like there was some sort of symbolic performance occurring there.” — Sarah Howe [12:36]
- “If you can keep everything and you always have something at hand for any possible eventuality... perhaps the dream of the hoarder is that they will never feel pain again.” — Sarah Howe [13:55]
- “My duty is to do the sorting and the ordering and the deciding what’s important and what’s not. And I guess the act of writing the poems felt like a corollary of that.” — Sarah Howe [16:23]
- “Poetry is maybe the form that means I’ve been able to do the most with the least… it allows me to speculate, to do a certain amount of emotional embroidery around their story and sort of show my position in all of this.” — Sarah Howe [60:24]
- “That really would feel like an exploitative prurience to me, I think. Whereas I think the sort of gaps and silences that poetry inscribes into its very fabric feel like a much more appropriate and respectful way of approaching this stuff.” — Sarah Howe [61:44]
Selected Timestamps & Segments
- [01:31] Opening on the central theme: family hoarding and its personal and cultural significance.
- [05:19] Discussion of Song Dong’s “Waste Not” and linking hoarding with trauma.
- [08:19] Personal reckoning: when does collecting tip into hoarding?
- [13:19] On the archival impulse, pain, and protection.
- [20:44] Host connects poetic form with resisting flattening/over-ordering of experience.
- [23:17] Reading and analysis of “Foremother” and the revelatory phrase “if it helps”.
- [30:23] Ethical complexity around selling family stories/publicizing pain.
- [37:31] On writing about children and ethical limits of exposure.
- [41:39] Howe reads the poem “Epic” about racial identity, genetics, and legacy.
- [47:29] The mirroring of domestic and colonial power dynamics.
- [50:45] The politics of language in the colonial family.
- [53:02] The cost of poetry—emotional consequences of writing and performing.
- [59:10] What poetry offers as an archival form over memoir or fiction.
- [61:44] Howe’s concluding thoughts on the respectful potential of poetic silence and suggestion.
Concluding Thoughts
Sarah Howe’s “Foretokens” continues her profound exploration of family, trauma, and diasporic identity, delicately balancing between personal archive and collective history. Through candid conversation and readings, this episode unpacks the tangled ethics, emotional labor, and artistic decisions that fuel her poetry. Howe’s reflections on mess, absence, and the limitations of language resonate powerfully—demonstrating both the risks and redemptive possibilities of poetic engagement with the past.