The Kids: Winner of the 2021 Costa Book of the Year

by Hannah Lowe

Overview

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 ‘The Kids’, her students, the teenagers 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. The sonnet is re-energised, becoming a classroom, a memory box and even a mind itself as ‘The Kids’ learn and negotiate their own unknown futures. These boisterous and musical poems explore and explode the universal experience of what it is to be taught, and to teach, ultimately reaching out and speaking to the child in all of us. The poems in the first section of the book draw on Hannah Lowe’s experiences as a teacher in the 2000s, but the scenarios are largely fictitious, as are the names of the students.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780375816
Publisher:	Bloodaxe Books
Publication date:	09/16/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	343 KB

About the Author

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. Her pamphlet The Hitcher (The Rialto, 2011) was widely praised. Her first book-length collection Chick (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) and Ormonde (Hercules Editions, 2014), and her family memoir Long Time No See (Periscope, 2015). She also read from Long Time, No See on BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in 2015. Her second full-length collection, Chan, was published by Bloodaxe in 2016, followed by a pamphlet, The Neighbourhood (Outspoken Press) in 2019. Her third full collection, The Kids (Bloodaxe Books, 2021) is a Poetry Book Society Choice. She has been poet in residence at Keats House, and in 2020 she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors.

Table of Contents

The White Dog 8

I

The Register 11

Try, Try, Try Again 12

Queen Bee 13

The Art of Teaching I 14

The Art of Teaching II 15

The Art of Teaching III 16

Technology 17

Sonnet for Vlad 18

The Only English Kid 19

Notes on a Scandal 20

Boy 21

Simile 22

The Sixth-form Theatre Trip 23

Sonnet for the A Level English Literature and Language Poetry Syllabus 24

Red-handed 25

Sonnet for the Punched Pocket 26

Pepys 27

Janine I 28

Janine II 29

The Unretained 30

All Over It 31

Sonnet for Rosie 32

Something Sweet 33

7/7 34

Ricochet 35

British-born 36

II

Mr Presley 38

Mrs Vanuka 39

Blocks 40

She 41

Bethena 42

Étudier 43

Martin and Pam 44

The Only Black Girl 45

Rain Dance 46

The Pitch 47

John I: Pink Humming Bird 48

John II: For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf 49

Love 50

So Amazing 51

The Stroke 52

Sonnet for Noah 55

Welling 56

Dear Professor 57

White Roses 58

Daughter 59

House 60

The River 61

Players 62

III

The Sky Is Snowing 64

Skirting 65

Scooting 66

Fire Scissors Drowning 67

The Size of Him 68

Sonnet for Boredom 69

Balloons 70

In H&M 71

Sonnet for Darren 72

Zoom 73

Aretha in the Bath 74

His Books 75

Anjali Mudra 76

Sonnet for Rory with Soap Bubbles 77

Ni hao 78

Kathy, Carla 79

Editorial Reviews

"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."

Costa Poetry Award Judges Rishi Dastidar

"Hannah 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."

The Irish Times - Seán Hewitt

"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."

Guardian - Mary Jean Chan

"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

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.

Andrew McMillan

"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