ALT The front cover of Divinations on Survival by Natalie Linh Bolderston against a starry mountain background.

ALT 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 mother's, 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.

ALT Divinations on Survival comes out in spring 2026 and can be pre-ordered now. If you would like to book me for a reading, talk or workshop, feel free to drop me an email: [email protected]

ALT Natalie Linh Bolderston is a Vietnamese-Chinese-British poet. In 2020, she received an Eric Gregory Award and co-won the Rebecca Swift Women Poets' Prize. Her poem 'Middle Name with Diacritics' came third in the 2019 National Poetry Competition and was shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. In 2024, she was Creative Future’s writer-in-residence for Stoke-on-Trent, her hometown. Her pamphlet, The Protection of Ghosts, was published by V. Press in 2019.