Winner of the 2021 Costa Book of the Year and the 2021 Costa Poetry Award. Selected as Poetry Book Society Choice for Autumn 2021 and shortlisted for the 2021 T S Eliot Prize.
Hannah Lowe taught for a decade in an inner-city London sixth form. At the heart of this book of compassionate and energetic sonnets are fictionalised portraits of 'The Kids', the students she nurtured. But the poems go further, meeting her own child self as she comes of age in the riotous 80s and 90s, later bearing witness to her small son learning to negotiate contemporary London.
Across these deeply felt poems, Lowe interrogates the acts of teaching and learning with empathy and humour. Social class, gender and race - and their fundamental intersection with education - are investigated with an ever critical and introspective eye. These boisterous and musical poems explore the universal experience of what it is to be taught, to learn and to teach.
Winner of the 2021 Costa Book of the Year and the 2021 Costa Poetry Award. Selected as Poetry Book Society Choice for Autumn 2021 and shortlisted for the 2021 T S Eliot Prize.
Hannah Lowe taught for a decade in an inner-city London sixth form. At the heart of this book of compassionate and energetic sonnets are fictionalised portraits of 'The Kids', the students she nurtured. But the poems go further, meeting her own child self as she comes of age in the riotous 80s and 90s, later bearing witness to her small son learning to negotiate contemporary London.
Across these deeply felt poems, Lowe interrogates the acts of teaching and learning with empathy and humour. Social class, gender and race - and their fundamental intersection with education - are investigated with an ever critical and introspective eye. These boisterous and musical poems explore the universal experience of what it is to be taught, to learn and to teach.
8 The White Dog
I
11 The Register
12 Try, Try, Try Again
13 Queen Bee
14 The Art of Teaching I
15 The Art of Teaching II
16 The Art of Teaching III
17 Technology
18 Sonnet for Vlad
19 The Only English Kid
20 Notes on a Scandal
21 Boy
22 Simile
23 The Sixth-form Theatre Trip
24 Sonnet for the A Level English Literature and Language Poetry
Syllabus
25 Red-handed
26 Sonnet for the Punched Pocket
27 Pepys
28 Janine I
29 Janine II
30 The Unretained
31 All Over It
32 Sonnet for Rosie
33 Something Sweet
34 7/7
35 Ricochet
36 British-born
II
38 Mr Presley
39 Mrs Vanuka
40 Blocks
41 She
42 Bethena
43 Étudier
44 Martin and Pam
45 The Only Black Girl
46 Rain Dance
47 The Pitch
48 John I: Pink Humming Bird
49 John II: For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the
Rainbow is Enuf
50 Love
51 So Amazing
52 The Stroke
55 Sonnet for Noah
56 Welling
57 Dear Professor
58 White Roses
59 Daughter
60 House
61 The River
62 Players
III
64 The Sky Is Snowing
65 Skirting
66 Scooting
67 Fire Scissors Drowning
68 The Size of Him
69 Sonnet for Boredom
70 Balloons
71 In H&M
72 Sonnet for Darren
73 Zoom
74 Aretha in the Bath
75 His Books
76 Anjali Mudra
77 Sonnet for Rory with Soap Bubbles
78 Nĭ hăo
79 Kathy, Carla
Bloodaxe Books
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. She has been poet in
residence at Keats House, and in 2020 she received a Cholmondeley
Award from the Society of Authors.
Her pamphletThe Hitcher(The Rialto, 2011) was widely praised. Her first book-length collectionChick(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) andOrmonde(Hercules Editions, 2014), and her family memoirLong Time No See(Periscope, 2015). She also read fromLong Time, No Seeon BBC Radio 4'sBook of the Weekin 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), was the Poetry Book Society Choice for Autumn 2021. It won the 2021 Costa Poetry Award and went on to be named Costa Book of the Year, and was also shortlisted for the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize.
Hannah Lowe’s The Kids is a book to fall in love with - it’s
joyous, it’s warm and it’s completely universal. It’s crafted and
skilful but also accessible... You will love it!
*Chair of Judges, 2021 Costa Book of the Year*
A contemporary book that buzzes with life while re-energising the
sonnet that Shakespeare would recognise. All readers will find
something of themselves here.
*Costa Poetry Award Judges Rishi Dastidar, Ian Duhig and Maya
Jaggi*
Hannah Lowe's brilliant and entertaining book of sonnets, The Kids,
is one of the most humorous and tender collections of recent
times.
*The Irish Times (The year in verse: the best poetry of 2021)*
Hannah 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.
*The Guardian (Best poetry books of 2021)*
Hannah 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.
*The Guardian, best recent poetry*
The poems in The Kids fizz and chat with all the vitality and
longing of the classes they conjure. Funny, moving, sometimes
painful and always questioning, they capture teachers and their
students learning life from each other in profound and unexpected
ways. A joy to read.
*Liz Berry*
These sequences of stories are a refreshing update to The Prime of
Miss Jean Brodie and To Sir with Love. Each of Lowe’s sonnets is a
blackboard chalked with the tales of earnest teachers, of cheeky
and lovable students, of being mentored to become a poet and of
motherhood and learning to instruct again. Lowe makes the sonnet
exciting for our age through its urgent, its compassionate, its
wonderfully humorous address of the personal and the social.
*Daljit Nagra*
Always, we are in the hands of Lowe's singular, effortless voice,
and reminded that all good education should be an education in
class, in the legacies and histories of empire and in the self.
*Poetry Book Society Bulletin*
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