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

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.

‘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