Sarah Howe, "Foretokens" (Random House, 2025)

Summary

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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)

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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.

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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.

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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]

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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.

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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.

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Transcript

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[Interviewer (Luke)]

welcome to the New Books Network. Child of a hoarder. I am not immune to this mania, this malaise, this inherited dream of an archive so complete nothing could ever hurt again. Those are the final lines of Sarah Howe's latest volume of poetry, Four Tokens, and I'm very happy to be here with Sarah today. Thanks for being here, Sarah. I thought we might begin with hoarding, which begins and ends the volume. Could you just say a bit about what it is that your mother hoards and what it is that you hoard?

[Sarah Howe (Poet)]

Well, I think that in my mind I'd drawn a clean line of separation between us, that she's the hoarder and I am not susceptible to such things. Except that that line, the more I scrutinized, started to get blurrier and blurrier.

I suppose my mum is somewhere along

the spectrum towards a bit of a pathological hoarder. Growing up in our house in Watford, which is where we moved when I was seven. After leaving Hong Kong, there was this sort of war being waged between my parents. So my Hong Kong Chinese mum and my English dad and entire rooms would get caught up as the frontier that she would periodically sort of start hoarding things in. In a. In a spare bedroom here or something. And then he would catch her and the frontier would get pushed back again.

I don't know. She. She hated throwing things away. It got to the point where my dad, in later childhood would actually sort

of bundle me up with things and say, look, take this packet of stuff out into town centre and throw it in the municipal bins. Because he knew that if he threw it in any of the bins in the house, these things would return and be scribbled away. I had the same experience of my rum sort of fishing things out of waste pay baskets endlessly.

I don't know. Books, I suppose, and I can probably.

That's where I most interface with her habits. Anything with words on it, letters, newspapers. She has an entire basement full of news copies of the times from 20 years ago.

And she says, no, I still. Still. I haven't had a chance to read it yet.

I'll still read it. Yeah, the list goes on. But I'll bore you with.

[Interviewer (Luke)]

There's a bit of a. I guess it's a bit of a cultural stereotype of. Maybe it has to do with the emigrant hoarder, which you mentioned is also a bit of a kind of stereotype of a. Maybe a Chinese kind of hoarder or Chinese clutter, You know, I think. I think there was a line, you know, about kind of things looking like a Chinese laundromat growing up, did your dad have that kind of view that there was something kind of cultural about. About the hoarding? And did that kind of filter into your consciousness at some point that you had to kind of wrestle with? Is maybe not just mom, but it's also something she represents?

[Sarah Howe (Poet)]

That's a really good question. I don't know if my dad extrapolated

it into a matter of national characteristics,

but I do wonder. Gosh, I can't remember his name. Now, the artist, the Chinese artist who made the installation called Waste Knot in the English translation. I'll have to look up his name.

He's very, very famous artist where he

took the contents of his mum's flat

in a hutong in Beijing and transposed it into a gallery setting. And she was a pathological hoarder and, you know, had kept bars of Soap going back 30 years and everything that had passed through her keeping was still there, basically like every pair of shoes that any family member had ever worn and so on.

And he sort of taxonomized it, putting

it into this gallery setting. But I think what that exhibit made clear to viewers was that there was some sort of trauma being worked through, like the years of hardship, I suppose, following the Cultural Revolution and the sufferings of that generation, and this idea of always having to have something to hand and in reserve in case catastrophe struck once again.

I mean, contemporary research on hoarding suggests

that it isn't necessarily tied to trauma or impoverishment as a child, but I

find it really hard not to connect

it to that in my mum's case. Well, the story that my adoptive grandmother told her was that she was rescued from a rubbish. And I find it very hard not to join up the dots of a woman who spent her life constitutionally unable to throw things away, who was herself quite possibly thrown away, and that there's a sort of compassion in a way, to that compulsion and a recognition, maybe a sentimental recognition, that as humans, we very readily become objects.

[Interviewer (Luke)]

Can you say more about the compassion and the compulsion?

[Sarah Howe (Poet)]

I suppose that she would want to spare things the fate of being wasted, but also I think that she has a value system that's perhaps calibrated differently

to other people, that she sees value or potential value in stuff that most of the rest of us would consider rubbish. And who's to say that her system is less correct than mine, I suppose, except at the point at which it interferes with functioning in daily life.

[Interviewer (Luke)]

Yeah. And then just want to return to this blurring of the lines that you mentioned. Referencing contemporary research on hoarding suggests that you've thought a lot about it, but also introspectively, not just in the world. When did the blurring begin in this self perception that you had nothing to do with your mother's hoarding?

[Sarah Howe (Poet)]

I suppose I've been a collector, and I suppose a collector is just a way of rationalizing, and a collector is just a hoarder with the space and

the means to pursue their compulsion in a way. I mean, everything from collecting Star wars memorabilia as a teenager to working through fascinations with. Actually, one of my current fascinations is obscure East Asian woodland plants, which I like to hunt down and then attempt to grow in my shady London garden and then often lose in excessively hot London summers. But, you know, I can see these. These tendencies in myself.

But I think I also came to think of myself as a sort of archivist of family history, maybe. And so When I wrote the poem that you quoted from, I was thinking about what an archive is and how

that overlaps, um, and is distinguished from a horde.

And I suppose the, the difference perhaps

is that there's an external consciousness that decides what's in and what's out. Um, and I sort of thought of myself, for better or worse, as adopting that role. Um, that in a funny way my mom and I have very different ideas about what it's important to preserve.

I think on some level that she

feels her history and her memories are important, but she also really doesn't. Whereas I feel very strongly about the ephemerality of her experiences and how if I don't record them in some form, they will just be lost to me and to successive generations and to the world really.

I guess it comes to a head

in the conflict described in that poem that at one point I try and clear out a patch of my parents attic so that my husband, that I can store some boxes there.

And actually the things I'm throwing out

are actually my old childhood toys that she had packaged up in Hong Kong and then never got round to unwrapping, which I think is a, a potent symbol in itself.

Right.

But why is she still keeping these toys that have fallen to bits because the plastic has degraded and that were never played again with by me or my brother once we moved to this side of the world. And why was she so devastated when it came to me trying to see if another generation might be able to play with them, realizing not and then throwing it all away. And I mean these things all, all happen.

And as is hinted at, but I

suppose not stated head on in that. And my mum was absolutely furious. I've never seen her so angry as the day I tried to throw away those boxes. But I did fury away. She was absolutely devastated with a level of fury that I've only ever seen her direct at my dad.

And then I came back after, I

think taking a baby for a walk a few days later. And I caught her at the morning room table in my parents house snipping up with a pair of scissors these black and white photographs of her early life, which obviously horrified me and I think to some extent was a performance on her part that she'd said and still maintains that she was helping with the clearing out effort, that she found these photographs that were duplicates and so she thought she would help shred them.

But I do think that there was

something sort of vengeful on the part

of her, but also maybe that she

was trying to communicate something symbolically, almost in the language of a dream to me, that. That she was saying. I don't know, that me throwing away those boxes was like me cutting up these pictures of her early life. I don't know if that's right as a reading of what she was doing,

but I felt like there was some

sort of symbolic performance occurring there. And, of course, I swooped in and rescued these photographs.

And I still have this box of

photographs in my flat now, but I saved from being chopped up.

And I can't sort of make sense

of them without her, but they feel like a precious trove to me.

[Interviewer (Luke)]

I'm thinking about these final lines in the book, this inherited dream of an archive so complete nothing could ever hurt again. So insofar as this archival motivation shapes your writing, do you write so that nothing could ever hurt again?

[Sarah Howe (Poet)]

So, I mean, that's a very good question, I suppose. Speaks to the blurring, but I guess I'd thought of that as one explanation for the hoarding, that if you can

keep everything and you always have

something

at hand for any possible eventuality, then perhaps the dream of the hoarder is that they will never feel pain again. Because one could be so enclosed and protected within the psychic bulwark and barricade that hoarding represents, that you could be shielded from that sort of loss. I know pain and loss are not the same thing,

but I suppose it's

also a retreat from the world hoarding, isn't it? I use the word barricade advisedly, but

I think I've always had this sense

of, my mom is in some way cut off from the world.

And I wouldn't have known how to

describe it as a child, except that in Hong Kong, when they told us the story about Chang', e, the moon goddess, at school, I started to cry. I remember when we were told that legend about her flying off and being banished to the moon with only the rabbit for company. Actually, in the version we were told, I don't think there was even the rabbit. So she was just by herself.

And the reason I cried is because

I identified her with my mum, even

at that age, because there's some part

of my mum that is sort of. I mean, you might describe it as dissociated, as I've come to know through reading a bit more about psychology.

But, yeah, she's sort of not all there. It feels like she lives in a

sort of fairy castle, which her house represents, at least that's the way I would describe it.

And so I, as the Next generation

coming along and knowing that at some stage I'll have to sort all these things out. Like quite literally empty her house at some point. As is the duty, I suppose, of mourning children.

I am at once aware that I will find it very hard to part

with a lot of these things and objects. And that I will have to part with them.

And so I don't think I have the luxury of

being able to indulge the same compulsion. Like 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. Sort of trying to sort through some of the chaos and noise to find a thread of story and sense, I think, because that's another thing that distinguishes a hoard and a collection maybe, maybe not all hoarders, but the element of chaos, mess. I think it's a book that's very interested in mess and chaos and noise. And I wanted the reader to have

an experience of all the books sort of 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.

[Interviewer (Luke)]

What were you worried about in the scenario in which the threads cohered earlier or too early in your view?

[Sarah Howe (Poet)]

I think I wasn't. It wasn't so much that I was worried about the mkheri earlier as that the organization of the book almost reflects

the period in which I was writing the book.

Insofar as for a number of years

I was accruing poems.

And I felt like they were all

just too random and disconnected from one another to work as a book. I had an idea of how I wanted a book to be. I wanted it to have a coherent theme and a satisfying progression through it. And so I kept saying to myself, oh gosh, I'm piling up these poems that will never speak to each other. I should just throw them away and start again with a coherent project from the outset. Of course, that didn't happen.

And so I had the curious experience

of getting to quite late on in the creation of the book and then writing the long poem at the end as almost a sort of savior poem. That would make these things like objects and material culture and DNA and quantum physics and. And babies and mothers and that would sort of make all of those things sit together in a way that felt like it made sense. Which had been quite random preoccupations of mine over the preceding decade. I hope that that's how it feels that it sort of all suddenly swims together.

[Interviewer (Luke)]

Yeah.

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[Interviewer (Luke)]

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[Sarah Howe (Poet)]

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[Interviewer (Luke)]

I'm just thinking about the mess and chaos, and it does seem to tie back to hoarding in the sense that you rightly point out that maybe the distinction between hoarding and collecting is more in our minds than in reality. But there is something about hoarding that can lead to a numbness about life or maybe a dissociation. And while you are doing a lot of collecting, even of language in the poems, there is something that is trying in keeping alive the mess and the chaos. There is something that reacts against the numbness through the poems. You know, there is a resistance to it flattening even as you're seeking a story and a thread. There isn't one story and thread that you want to flatten the poems into. And you seem to be holding kind of several threads in suspension kind of at once.

[Sarah Howe (Poet)]

Oh, I'm glad if it feels that way.

[Interviewer (Luke)]

I thought we might. I might read a poem right now if, if you don't mind. So this is the title is Foremother Truth Becomes Fiction when the Fiction is true. Real becomes not real when the unreal is real. Cao Xuexin Dream of the Red Chamber what I know begins outside. Within the limits of Shanghai, a girl is born, youngest of many. One day. If it helps say, the bowls are empty. The girl is sold to strangers. If it helps say, it sounds like a fairy tale. Did you see the look in her mother's eyes? This is what happened happens then now, where money buys desire. Silence. If it helps say, her mother was dead. What she went on to live, what she became, you can imagine. I thought I might start by asking you just about a specific tone of phrase, if it helps, which occurs several times. It's a very subtle but powerful device in the poem, and I wonder if you could say a bit about what work it's doing in the poem.

[Sarah Howe (Poet)]

I suppose that poem was one I had really struggled to know how to

write

and tried various different routes into

it

before settling on that one. And it was a poem that I.

I'm actually forgetting the succession, whether I.

I think I wrote it before the.

The long poem at the end that we just heard from.

But I wrote it conscious that I

would need to do some sort of narrative backstory so that readers would be able to orientate themselves in the last poem.

And so I think I hearkened on this device of, if it helps, fairly

early on in the drafting of this version.

And I was looking for something that

would be quite multivalent tonally, that it's

quite ironic in some iterations, but of

course it helps not a jot to say it sounds like a fairy tale. And then at other occasions, it seems to almost be a comforting thing or a gesture of sort of reaching out a hand to the reader or even

to the little girl in the story, I suppose I was writing this poem

on the basis of hardly any information at all.

So this is.

Well, I mean, much of what I know, almost most of what I know about my mum's adoptive mum, that.

And actually this was information that my

mum passed on to me between the writing of my first book and my second book.

So I had known

that my grandmother was a sex worker, though that's something that the poems only touch on very obliquely. And in fact, I had very much not wanted to reveal or touch on that in Luke of Jade, my first collection. I think partly because I was worried about my dad, actually, rather than my mum, who I don't think is particularly worried about people knowing that bits of information. But what I hadn't known was that she had been sold by her Family. And my. My mum had mentioned that to me hilariously in passing, in the way that she does so much and maybe is true of other people and their parents, passing on what might seem like crucial parts of the puzzle, that my mum very much said it like, yes, well, she was sold by her family, as they did when everyone was short throughed. And that was just what they did. And I suppose, yes, the coordinates like, was it in Shanghai or outside Shanghai? Shanghai was involved, but we don't really know how. The clues are that my mum knows that her mother spoke Shanghai knees. But I guess the lack of information also reflects, I think, the extraordinary lack of communication between my mom and her mother, adopted mother, that she obviously just never asked, right. She never said, tell me more about this, I would like to know more. And so the fragments that she's passed down to me, that's all that she knows of that woman's history, really.

And so that's why I came onto the device of the forward slash as

well that mocks those alternatives that you were reading aloud that I found myself having to write this poem where I just didn't really know which of those alternatives would be the truth. And so I sort of let the truth just hover somewhere between them in the uncertainty.

[Interviewer (Luke)]

One of the ways in which you are an archivist, so to speak, is really in excavating this kind of matrilineal set of experiences, many of which are painful, though not always uniformly experienced as such, as you just mentioned. But there's. I guess in light of that, I want to ask you about one line in the book, which is. I recently resolved never again to make a poem for another's pain. Can you say more about how you hold these facts or points in your head? Intention or are they not intention?

[Sarah Howe (Poet)]

They're absolutely intention. That that poem comes. That line comes from a. Well, actually it's two lines. It's a failed couplet, isn't it? Because again, and pain, at least in my accent, aren't a perfect rhyme. And I think that's part of the sense of offness. The. As well, those imperfect rhymes often signal some sort of dissonance in the poems, even a cognitive dissonance, actually, that even in the course of that poem it contradicts itself, that it messed up the oceaning, that it won't be making a poem out of anybody's pain. And then it goes on to do exactly that.

And I suppose it's.

It's an elegy for an undergraduate friend of mine from Cambridge. We knew each other as students. And there's a certain amount of sort of quasi guilty nostalgia about Bridesheady student days in it, as well as just the reality of him dying very unpicturesquely from bowel cancer in his 30s, leaving behind two small children, which is perhaps one of the worst fates I could imagine. I find that possibility absolutely terrifying, the thought of dying and leaving my children behind. So, but.

But it's also this sense of why

is that an uncomfortable thing to do? Is that an appropriative thing to do? To write an elegy for a friend? Not being an immediate friend, family members say of him, like, what's my place in that story? Not as an immediate sufferer of that grief, but I guess one at some remove.

But that discomfort.

How ethically to orientate yourself in relation to somebody's pain. And I guess maybe we could come back to the idea of compassion we started with is very much there in the form of a poem. Also, inasmuch as

that line sold to strangers recurs twice.

So in the first half of the poem that you read, it's describing factually the girl being sold. But by the time it recurs in the second half of the poem, which. Whose syntax spools back the other way, 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. So by that point I'm the one doing the selling, at least in the most pessimistic view of what a writer is in my situation. But I don't know, I guess even you can take at least two different standpoints on what somebody like me is doing in writing about her. You could say that I'm commercializing a certain idea of exotic Chinese suffering. Or you could say, and I sort of did think this myself, that for me that poem was a funny sort of time traveling. But in writing it I almost imagined that I could sort of reach out a hand to that little girl who was alone at that point in her life, you know, and sort of influence things the other way along the space time continuum, which of course is impossible and consoles her, not a wit, but maybe consoles me that her experience is not totally unregarded.

[Interviewer (Luke)]

One of the things you mentioned earlier that's fascinating is that it really wasn't your mom who minded the fact that her mom had been a sex worker being shared. It was your dad. And you know, sometimes it's the game of guessing who might be concerned or offended by something Being shared is not an easy one. Does that make you feel like, I mean, do you come to a point where you just say, well, I just have to kind of express what feels creatively integral to the poetry? Or have you come to some method of gauging when it is to divulge the pain of others?

[Sarah Howe (Poet)]

Yeah, I mean this is something that poets who write about their families and loved ones do end up thinking about. And I suppose it's configured slightly differently

for us to either fiction writers on the one hand or non fiction writers and memoirists on the other. In inasmuch as poetry seems to exist in a blurred space between both of those forms in terms of a readership's assumption of the truth or otherwise, of the scenarios and stories sketched in Poland.

I for my part did show the

manuscripts of both of my books. Well the first one to my mum and my dad.

I actually now wonder if my dad never read it, though he gained party approval. I mean if he didn't, maybe it's just as well.

He certainly didn't pick up on the

various poems which I went so far

as to post it. Note actually in the typescript just to make sure he was extra sure about me publishing them. Because there are all sorts of sort of very unflattering echoes of him across that book. I was much more worried about what he would think than my mum, I

suppose, not least because the portrait of

her that emerges in that book is really quite uncomplicatedly not homographic. But I don't think there's much to object to in it really as just a record of her what's childhood.

Whereas I showed her the manuscript of

this book and I was a bit more nervous because there are moments of

more conflict and tension between us that

I record in this book. As it happens, we hadn't really had a head on conversation about the poems.

She. I think she might have decided that

that's just not somewhere she wants to go.

So we have conversations about the book

where she sort of says, oh, is it great for you published America? And how's it going? Are you very busy doing readings? But I think she just doesn't want to engage with the, with the, with the sort of truth or otherwise or discomfort of the poems. Well, not least the fact that that last poem speculates in a whole world of speculation about whether her mum was actually telling the truth or not, that she was found on the rubber sheep or if maybe she was actually her biological daughter. Which is all based on my seeing a photograph of my mum at about five with her mum, adoptive mum, and thinking, oh gosh, there's no way they're not related to each other, all of which is in Matthoran. But then that intuition sort of evaporates that I look at the photograph again and I can't see the resemblance again,

which is all a roundabout wave answering the question.

But that photograph is a real one, and my repeated returning to it is a record of a real process. But I do not want to share that photograph and never will, because I sort of don't want to crowdsource everyone having an opinion about whether they resemble one another or not.

So does that make sense that I'm happy to do a certain amount of

exposure, but I would like to maintain the delicacy of control over that degree of exposure. And for me it feels like sharing the photograph is a step too far, even though I'm sure lots of people would find it a very interesting document to see. But that's a place where I've drawn a boundary for my privacy and my

[Interviewer (Luke)]

I'm very struck by this question of who to involve as kind of arbiters of truth and falsity in a poem. Something I thought I would bring up later but now feels a good moment, is that a few of the poems in this volume also touch on your children who have come into the world between Loop of Jade and Four Tokens. When you've written poems that include them, do you think of them as potential arbiters of truth and falsity of your poems in the future? And if so, how does that make you feel?

[Sarah Howe (Poet)]

I am quite conscious of not wanting to overexpose them. And so while I absolutely love the

poems about her children of a writer like Sharon Oles, for example, I feel

quite squeamish at the thought of being

the child with his juvenile penis being described or something. I just don't really want to go there.

Maybe some of these poems could be said to go too far along that line, except that I think that the children are quite effaced really.

They're quite generic in the poems in which they appear deliberately so maybe the

most on the nose one is the

one where the one called Epic that gets into a sort of familial scenario of the Prince Harry Meghan Markle relative commenting on what the Bailey looks like ethnically sort of territory which is about my daughter and the extent to which she does or doesn't look Chinese, which was a source of lots of speculation by many people, I guess, because she's the curious combination of a child who has sort of epicanthic folds and you know, her facial structure and eye structure looks quite Chinese, but she's got blonde hair. Hair. And so I guess people find this very fascinating and curious. And that poem is a place for registering that sort of curiosity and the discomfort of it in multiple directions.

And so maybe that's the only poem

that I would potentially worry how it would make Willow feel down the years. Except that I think it's fairly clear that all of that is happening in adult sphere that doesn't actually have anything to do with her per se.

And I think that this might become more relevant as the children get older

and feel like agents and actors more and more so in their own right,

that I feel like almost my writing Cohens about them.

That phase has now ended. But now they're not literally babies or 2 year olds anymore. They sort of have too much presence in the world already to be rightly captured in poems of mine. But that would be too Exposing Protein

[Interviewer (Luke)]

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[Interviewer (Luke)]

While we're talking about this, would you mind reading the poem Epic or another poem in which your children feature? I think that would be a great thing for conversation.

[Sarah Howe (Poet)]

I suppose.

Maybe I should read Epic because I've just mentioned it.

Okay, well this poem, it's part of

its discomfortingness is also the fact that it's recalling. Well, it's also it's thinking about genetics and eugenics I suppose, which is another theme in the book, but also an

instance of childhood racism in the English

playground at the sort of reason I find myself sucked baft him towards the end.

Epic early on I wonder at our daughter how my strong genes could birth one so improbably fair. I whisper my chick to her cradle cat wisps now almost see through husband, joking, is she really mine? This all seems mostly a laugh, till one day a relative points out the baby and looks more Chinese than her brother, innocently mint. It's something around the eyes. Later I scrutinize the flaky moon of her face imprinted on those otherworldly nights, trace epicanthic folds more marked than mine in her shuffled deck of eclectic traits, this personal babel chromosomal riddle of crumbs leading back through God knows what ancestral dark as she snuffs draws her taut bow into my chest eyes and fists tight. And yes, when I had seen out half a race of zodiac beasts and landed on Earth's other face, I began to dream of hair. This shade rubbed roiling clouds of talc into my cheeks. That day an English girl mid ringer ring recoiled from the invisible yellow stain my gripped palm left on hers, asking the mirror for the difference

[Interviewer (Luke)]

was the was this connection between your daughter and your childhood memory, was it there from the beginning in the drafting or did it come in later?

[Sarah Howe (Poet)]

I think it was one of those sudden associative leaps. I'm thinking back to the way the drafted poem worked. I think originally the poem ended before

the leap back to my childhood, so

I think that must have come in

around draft four or five and that

jump into the past felt in four, two and like. Also part of following this discomforting logic being pursued in the poem, which is a sort of internalized racist logic, I

suppose that it's recalling a dream that I had and I think that this is not uncommon among children of color growing up in white majority societies of you know what. What would it be if I were blonde and blue eyed and you know, could seamlessly fit in with this culture and seem to be part of it? I was comforted after showing this poem to a poet friend, a good friend who is of South Asian heritage. And she said that when she was the same age she had a dream alter ego self who she named Sarah, who was bond and blue. And that made me laugh.

I mean that's not how I feel

now, but it did.

I wanted to insert that connection to show that this sort of curiosity about

what the phenotype of mixed race children that even if it's not intendedly racist, there are these sort of currents around it that can be difficult. Shall we say

[Interviewer (Luke)]

something about this turn to the next generation that appears in this volume? I guess it makes me think of how you've written poems before that are overtly political and that including some in this volume. So for example, there is the poem with the title, I guess Poetry in Cantonese, in which you are looking at the legal document and working off of that. But political context is not over in most of the poetry. And yet there is this undercurrent of all kinds of experiences, including what you just mentioned, that very much have their place in a kind of social and political dimension. So am I right to say that it's that kind of the political concern that you have as a poet? Has it shifted to different forms or have you felt like it's receded while other things have taken its place?

[Sarah Howe (Poet)]

I think that's very perceptive way of framing it, Lukas, that maybe the politics is wore on the sleeve of Lee

Jade in as much as I guess I was head on thinking at various points about totalitarian silencing in a sort

of Chinese and Hong Kong context and

to be him memorializing the Tiananmen incident or not as the case may be.

But even then there was a personal dimension to it that was maybe more

covert than overt in as much as

I think that part of my fascination

with the bullying state must have mapped onto my own childhood growing up with the very complicated figure of my father, who in lots of ways was a sort of tyrant over our domestic sphere. And my parents marriage was very much a colonial situation in that sense. And so it's maybe that aspect of the politics of Luke of Jade that I feel has come through into four tokens. The sort of the ways that the domestic sphere might mirror or enact even a larger political situation. Which is why there's things like that little line about my dad. This really happens looking around the house and saying this sounds. Looks like a Chinese laundry. And you know, once you drill down into a line like that, which feels like a throwaway moment and is sort of jokey and yet it's very interesting whether audiences will laugh at that moment when I read the poem out loud,

like there's quite a lot of laughter

in that poem until its last few strokes, which then get quite discomforting quite rapidly. That of course Chinese laundries in the UK as well as in the States were the most visible interface between a wider white community and the Chinese presence in Britain for certainly through the 20th

century, until domestic washing machines became commonplace from the 60s.

And they were, you know, at moments of racial tension and flare up, they were often firebombed and.

And after the 60s, those same shop

fronts often turned into Chinese restaurants and takeaways, I think, is the history.

And so I. That line became a sort of little

portal into thinking about a much bigger history of interracial relations and intercultural relation than just my parents. And yet their story, my story, is also part of that bigger story.

[Interviewer (Luke)]

I'm struck by this mirroring that you're pointing out between a colonial family and a colonial political system. One difference is that political systems have legal scripts that they go off of as your poem about the basic law kind of jumps off of. Families might have scripts in some behavioral sense, but there's no constitution that we can refer to and argue about, you know, kind of what our rights and obligations are. How might poetry provide us into a window on kind of the language that makes a colonial family function, or any family, but you know about that.

[Sarah Howe (Poet)]

Well, I guess in my colonial family, the question of language was quite an

immediate and fraught one.

I've spent many years puzzling over why my mum never really spoke to me and my brother in Cantonese to the extent that we could actually become fluent enough to function in the language. She explains it in different ways according to how you approach her about it. But whether it's worries about, you know, in the 80s, bilingualism being thought to slow children down and so on is, I'm sure, part of it. But she also maintains that my dad wouldn't have wanted us to be able to communicate in a language that he couldn't understand, which I was always skeptical about, I have to say. Until I came in my late twenties to study at SOAS for a couple of years to learn Mandarin, they didn't unfortunately, have an intensive course in Cantonese, otherwise I wouldn't have taken that one. But I did find myself wanting to practice speaking Mandarin with my mum. And that was quite eye opening, actually, that my dad had always maintained that it had nothing to do with him, this. This not passing on a language because he would have loved us to speak Chinese. Until my mom and I did actually start speaking to each other in Chinese. And it actually enraged him. He wouldn't tell us to leave the room, actually. It made him so angry. And then I thought, oh, maybe my mom was right, that one. That, yeah, that it's very explicable on a human level, but it's also a sort of Surveillance that, you know, he wouldn't have wanted us to be able to plot without him.

[Interviewer (Luke)]

That's quite an incredible story to kind of reflect on this question. I just want to zoom out now and I guess just for the listeners to bear in mind that it's been 10 years since your previous volume of poetry. I would love to hear your thoughts on what you've reflected on in the past 10 years about what a poem costs.

[Sarah Howe (Poet)]

I won't ask you for clarification over

what you mean by that because it's

so beautiful as a metaphor in. In its own right, but I don't want to sell it. What a poem costs. I think that that has become ever clearer to me when I perform these poems as I've been doing a lot

recently because I've been invited to do a lot of readings.

And I found myself in the first few months of this book coming out, I. I suppose I was making things

easier on myself and was reading from a lot of the less personal poems in the book, like the ones about

the Chinese ceramics and so on, which is a lot easier to do. But just recently I found myself wanting to drill into the story of the

book a bit more and particularly this knot of poems around my grandmother and revisiting the sort of enigma of her.

But every time I do that, I've

found myself coming home so exhausted that I almost have to spend the day in bed after. After doing a reading like that, because it's so. So draining emotionally as well as anything else.

And I think that has brought home

to me the cost of a poem that a book. Reading poem like that out loud on a stage and sharing it with a room is enough to almost make me ill, actually.

And that's without it being my personal

experience in any way. So I guess you could almost describe that as a sort of. I don't know what, like performative empathy, fatigue or something, I'm not sure. But it does seem to knock me out.

And I think that might be part of the explanation of why it was so long, the gap between books as

well, that there were lots of things going on, including a sense of pressure and expectation, and that I wouldn't be able to live up to the spurious success that my first book was.

But I think also part of the

problem was the fact that I knew I needed and wanted to loot background to these very hard personal poems about my lol. And then my grandmother, who I hadn't really touched on lived yet and yet that I didn't. I sort of also didn't want to write those poems.

I felt I was done with that subject matter and I'd laid it to rest in the first book and that was enough.

I also wasn't sure if I wanted

to expose that story. Not so much because of my mum

being uncomfortable about it, because I think, strangely, she actually isn't that uncomfortable, but because of me being uncomfortable about it. And so the poems that we've just been reading and talking about the foremother, and the error goes, I thought the

book was finished before I wrote any

of those, and I really only wrote those in, like, the month before the final manuscript was due. Because at that point I thought, well, it's now or never. And it was almost too late at that stage. It made the proof stage very, very stressful. But, yeah, I think I'd literally been putting it off because I wasn't sure if I wanted to do it or not.

[Interviewer (Luke)]

This feeling of now or never, I mean, apart from the more prosaic side of time and deadlines, is there also something about what that says about the poet's intuition about what you need to complete a work, even if there's a part of you that doesn't want to, that there is an intuition inside of you of what this book will cost to use that language, even when it goes against some of the. Maybe the instinct of self protection?

[Sarah Howe (Poet)]

I think that's right and I think there's a reason why it all came together and fell into place so late in the day. I think poets often describe, like, one

last poem coming into a manuscript at the eleventh hour, or sometimes the title comes to them at that stage, like

some sort of keystone that was absent

from the manuscript until it was almost too late, and then it sort of arrived and made everything hold together.

And I think intuition is a good

way of putting it, actually, that sometimes

our conscious brains, I mean, we might even be able to detect that something's missing.

But, like, diagnosing what is needed to fill that gap is very, very hard. And so you almost need to trust the unconscious machinations to spit it out for you.

[Interviewer (Luke)]

I thought I might end with a very ignorant question and loop back to the very beginning of our conversation about hoarding and collecting. So you're definitely a collector, and that may or may not be continuous with hoarding. And you're also kind of doing the work of an archivist in the sense of the family kind of memory and lore. What would it look like to do those things if you weren't a poet? And I guess the flip side of that is, what is it that poetry offers for. Specifically for those activities that are difficult to replace through other means?

[Sarah Howe (Poet)]

Well, I suppose the most obvious alternate path I could have taken would have

been that of the nonfiction memoirist, I suppose. I mean, my life is not particularly interesting, but doing a sort of intergenerational wild swans tracing back through my mother and grandmother, maybe. And yet there's so little material there

that I think 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. I suppose maybe I could spend a few more days and weeks with my mum in a tape recorder and eke out some more. But really, there's no archival sources that I could go to in a documentary sense. Like both of them were totally unimportant, insignificant people in the social record, but which, you know, there aren't archives about women like them.

And so I feel like poetry is

maybe the form that means I've been able to do the most with the least in that sense, that it allows me to speculate, if not in a sort of. In the direction of reconstructing a fictive world, as you would if you gave yourself license to write a novel about their stories. But it's given me a place in which I can sort of do a certain amount of emotional embroidery around their story and sort of show my position in all of this as the one trying to puzzle it out and necessarily foreground the priorities and limitations of me as the descendant there.

I guess fiction doesn't really appeal to

me as a route to take with this sort of thing.

But I'm sure one purely. People do say to me, sarah, why

don't you write a novel about this? And I would very much hesitate about that unless it was going to be the very most fragmentary and. And experimental of novels that I would find something almost distasteful about reconstructing my grandmother's life zone in Technicolor detail.

[Interviewer (Luke)]

That.

[Sarah Howe (Poet)]

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 to me. Yeah, yeah.

[Interviewer (Luke)]

That reminds me of, you know, how a kind of classic Chinese painting, you know, frames what is. With the absence of the scroll and. Yeah, and I guess I would just add two. Because know, two words on that, which I think is. I think it's. It's about absences, as you say. I think it's also about surprise and the way in which poetic language surprises itself and can surprise the reader. It's not that fiction can't do that, but I think, you know, there's a search for a story and a thread here. But in every poem and across the poems there are just many moments of surprise. And it's kind of going back to the mess and the chaos, where those gaps and absences, they contain the mess and the chaos only partially, which is probably as good as one can do. Thanks a lot for talking with me today. It's been an absolute favourite.

[Sarah Howe (Poet)]

Oh, thank you so much, Luke. It's an Enjoy.

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