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.