Divinations on Survival

'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