Heirloom

This first collection from a Caribbean-born writer examines how violence shapes four generations of women and how each generation resists the dysfunction, tyranny, and terror inherited from the previous one.

Finalist for 2026 CLMP Firecracker Awards for Independently Published Literature
Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2026
Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2025
Shortlisted for the Forward (Jerwood) Prize for Best First Collection 2025
Shortlisted for the OCM Bocas Lit Prize for Caribbean Literature 2026
Longlisted for the Jhalak Poetry Prize 2026
A California Review of Books Best Poetry Book of 2025
A Poetry Book Society Commendation

'How the noise in my head grows and grows,
splinters into phantoms and shapes,

graceless muses for her cot-mobile.
How I terror.'

Moving from colonial to post-colonial St Lucia, this debut collection brings to light the inheritances of four generations of women, developing monologues, lyrics and narrative poems which enable us to see how past dysfunction, tyranny and terror structure the shapes of women's lives, and what they hand down to one another.

Uneasy inheritances are just the starting point for this debut's remarkable meditations: Should the stories of the past be told? Do they bring redemption or ruin? What are the costs of saying what happened? Beguiling and cathartic, Catherine-Esther Cowie's powerful, formally inventive poems reckon with the past even as they elegise and celebrate her subjects.

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