Chan is a mercurial name, representing the travelers and shape-shifters of the poems in this collection. It is one of the many nicknames of Hannah Lowe's Chinese-Jamaican father, borrowed from the Polish migr card magician Chan Canasta. It is also a name from China, where her grandfather's story begins. Alongside these figures, there's Joe Harriott, the Jamaican alto saxophonist, shaking up 1960s London; a cast of other long-lost family; and a ship full of dreamers sailing from Kingston to Liverpool in 1947 on the SS Ormonde. Hannah Lowe's second collection follows her widely acclaimed debut, Chick.

Chan

Literature & Fiction

Lowe, Hannah

Poetry

Bloodaxe Books

Review\nLowe’s book is a collection of sonnets focused primarily on her life as a teacher in London, but it also looks back to her time as a student and outside the school to dating and grieving. The poems are funny, tender, occasionally inspiring and sometimes achingly sad — which pretty much sums up a career in teaching.\nThe judges said The Kids “has a universality to it — in a simple way, because everybody’s been to school.” Indeed, I want to give copies to half a dozen teachers — starting with my wife and my younger daughter. -- Ron Charles ― The Washington Post Book Club\n"The Kids is the real deal. A page turner about the experience of teaching and being taught, it made us want to punch the air with joy... A contemporary book that buzzes with life while re-energising the sonnet that Shakespeare would recognise. All readers will find something of themselves here." -- Rishi Dastidar, Ian Duhig and Maya Jaggi (Judges) ― Costa Poetry Award\nHannah Lowe's brilliant and entertaining book of sonnets, The Kids, is one of the most humorous and tender collections of recent times. -- Seán Hewitt ― The Irish Times (The year in verse: the best poetry of 2021)\nHannah Lowe’s The Kids, inspired by her time teaching in an inner London sixth form, is a series of sonnets full of joy. The book is generous in its compassion, and in love with the idea of learning, in the classroom and outside it. -- Rishi Dastidar ― The Guardian (Best poetry books of 2021)\nThe Kids by Hannah Lowe. This book reads very much like a labour of love. Anyone who commits to writing, and asks the reader to commit to reading, 66 sonnets has got to have plenty to say. These poems never flinch and the best of them (‘The Only English Kid’, ‘In H&M’, ‘Janine I/II’) leave us caring for the kids as much as she does. -- Carl Tomlinson ― Poetry News (Best poetry books of the year 2021)\nThe first half of Hannah Lowe’s sonnet sequence The Kids is an affectionate portrait of her time teaching a class of struggling students (“Each page we read is a step up a mountain/ in gluey boots”). The second reflects on family and her own schooldays, with memorable lines on messy adolescent desire: there’s a boy whose “voice was like a shirt unbuttoning”. Lowe’s social conscience, grounded register and frank humanity recall Tony Harrison... -- Tristram Fane Saunders ― The Telegraph\nThe Kids asks awkward questions about institutionalized education, but retains an unshakable faith in the kids and the joy they derive from learning and from their world and, because of this, it imagines a bright future. -- John Field ― T S Eliot Prize\nHannah Lowe’s previous two collections, Chick and Chan, focused on her relationship with her Jamaican-Chinese father, alongside coming-of-age recollections. The Kids marks a departure: an introspective book of modern sonnets, it offers a glimpse into her experiences of teaching in an inner-city London sixth form. The collection includes homages to her own teachers, and concludes with a sequence lovingly written for her young son… This is a playful yet moving collection that will make the reader frown and laugh, sometimes both at once. -- Mary Jean Chan ― The Guardian\nHannah Lowe’s The Kids combines formal skill with a rare bravery, and bears a lightness of touch that is often virtuosic. This book of sonnets is deeply enjoyable to read… The sequencing of the sonnets is brilliant, so that the book unfolds and deepens with every new page -- Seán Hewitt ― The Irish Times\nHannah Lowe’s third full-length collection The Kids is a book of loose, light-touch sonnets about growing up and growing old, parents and children, teaching and learning. -- Andy Croft ― Morning Star\nLowe’s skill at working with traditional forms has been strongly in evidence from her debut collection Chick onwards. She has an easy, conversational take on the iambic pentameter line, and is skilled at finding both full and slant rhymes that don’t come across as forced. This results in poems that

The Kids

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. 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.

Chick

Hannah Lowe's father "Chick," a half-Chinese, half-black Jamaican immigrant, worked long hours at night to support his family—except Chick was no ordinary working man. A legendary gambler, he would vanish into the shadows of East London to win at cards or dice, returning during the daylight hours to greet the daughter whose love and respect he courted.
In this poignant memoir, Lowe calls forth the unstable world of card sharps, confidence men, and small-time criminals that eventually took its toll on Chick. She also recalls her own coming-of-age in a London suburb during the racially charged 1980s and conjures her father's difficult childhood in a changing Jamaica, where he first honed his formidable skills. Lowe tells Chick's story eloquently, even as she begins to make sense of her own.
Gently paced, dramatic, and complex, Long Time No See speaks of love and its absence; regret and compassion; and the struggle to know oneself.
Hannah Lowe teaches at the Poetry School in London. Her poetry collection, Chick, was shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Long Time No See

Parenting & Relationships

Parenting

Periscope

Losing Faith, Gaining Hope

Genre Fiction

Independently published

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