Overview

Natalie Linh Bolderston’s debut collection traces her matrilineal heritage across continents and centuries, interweaving her voice with those of her mother and grandmother. The poems move between 1930s China, 1970s Vietnam and an ancient landscape populated by mothers, daughters and deities from Vietnamese and Chinese myth. Divinations on Survival asks what it means to share a lineage in the shadow of war, and traces the complex legacies of survival that emerge as a result of conflict. Always returning to the question of how intimate, familial ties are warped and undone by political turmoil, violence and displacement, the collection distils and expands on stories passed down from grandmother to mother, to daughter, and casts women not as victims, but as powerful protectors, healers and survivors. Formally innovative and supple, these poems disrupt and unsettle meaning, confronting the colonising force of language to work towards a radical new poetics.

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9781805965909

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Reviews

'Natalie Linh Bolderston is a young poet with a captivating voice. Her striking imagery creates memorable landscapes and her poems traverse territories and time, and bear witness to stories of intergenerational suffering and survival. Hers is an important voice – the kind that rarely appears in the landscape of British poetry.' Romalyn Ante 'The voice that emerges in these poems is singular and open, close to water and myth, channelling old songs and history into new poetic shapes. One of the most moving features of Bolderston’s Divinations on Survival is the way it preserves the silences and redactions that distort communication across generations, across state lines, and between loved ones. This wise and loving book expands the scope of poetry in this country: a protest against the insularity of the Western gaze, against history, because ‘home is swept away / every minute you're not there’.' Will Harris 'Divinations on Survival unravels family history and reimagines lost dreamscapes. Bolderston’s poems are lyrical and otherworldly; there are vivid portraits of a girlhood ‘smeared red’, memories intricately layered with myth and history. To this poet, poems are intensely physical objects – you feel them move across the page in flares of colour and sound. With her assured and inventive poetic voice, Bolderston beautifully weaves stories of mothers and daughters, of exile and return.' Nina Mingya Powles 'Natalie Linh Bolderston’s family stories of Vietnamese-Chinese refugees who fled to the UK are hair-raising, but I always come away from them feeling that she has revealed what life on earth is really like. Her poems are made of fire and bone, they thrill with their consummate forms, they enlarge and enrich British poetics – here is a major new storyteller and image-maker.' Pascale Petit

Author Information

Natalie Linh Bolderston is a Vietnamese-Chinese-British poet from Stoke-on-Trent. She has won an Eric Gregory Award and the Rebecca Swift Women Poets’ Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She is an alumna of the Roundhouse Poetry Collective, the London Library Emerging Writers’ Programme, and Writing West Midlands’ Room 204 programme. Her pamphlet, The Protection of Ghosts, was published by V. Press in 2019.

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