Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Hannah Lowe's first book of poems takes you on a journey round her father, a Chinese-black Jamaican migrant who disappeared at night to play cards or dice in London's old East End to support his family, an unstable and dangerous existence that took its toll on his physical and mental health. 'Chick' was his gambling nickname. A shadowy figure in her childhood, Chick was only half known to her until she entered the night world of the old man as a young woman. The name is the key to poems concerned with Chick's death, the secret history of his life in London, and her perceptions of him as a father. With London as their backdrop, Hannah Lowe's deeply personal narrative poems are often filmic in effect and brimming with sensory detail in their evocations of childhood and coming-of-age, love and loss of love, grief and regret. Winner of the 2015 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, and the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry 2014.
Price: $16.95
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Imprint: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date:
24 January 2013
ISBN: 9781852249601
Format: Paperback
‘The British-born poet conjures her gambler, Afro‑Chinese Jamaican father, the eponymous Chick, who boarded the SS Ormonde to Britain in 1947. Lowe is in dialogue with her father in the collection...’ - Colin Grant, Historian and writer, The Guardian (Windrush at 75: books that shaped the black British experience), on Chick
Hannah Lowe was born in Ilford to an English mother and Jamaican-Chinese father. She has lived in London, Brighton and Santa Cruz, California. She studied American Literature at the University of Sussex and has a Masters degree in Refugee Studies, and a PhD in Creative Writing from Newcastle University. She has worked as a teacher of literature, and is now a lecturer in Creative Writing at Brunel University. Her pamphlet The Hitcher (The Rialto, 2011) was widely praised. Her first book-length collection Chick (Bloodaxe Books, 2013) won the 2015 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry, and was selected for the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation Poets 2014 promotion. This was followed by two pamphlets, R x (sine wave peak, 2013) and Ormonde (Hercules Editions, 2014), and her family memoir Long Time No See (Periscope, 2015). She also read from Long Time, No See on BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in 2015. Her second full-length collection, Chan, was published by Bloodaxe in 2016, followed by a pamphlet, The Neighbourhood (Out-Spoken Press) in 2019. Her third full collection, The Kids (Bloodaxe Books, 2021), is the Poetry Book Society Choice for Autumn 2021. She has been poet in residence at Keats House, and in 2020 she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors.