We’re launching the latest three in the Five Leaves New Poetry series of pamphlets at Nottingham Central Library – come and join us!

Sue Forrester and Elizabeth Dunford will read from their new pamphlets, Familiar Phantoms and Balancing Act. We’re hoping to also welcome Ramisha Rafique from her new home in South Korea by the magic of Zoom to read from her pamphlet The Postcolonial Flâneuse. And we’ll have the usual line-up of previous pamphleteers to start the evening off for us.

Carole Bromley: “I enjoyed the company of Familiar Phantoms. There are many different phantoms in Sue Forrester’s beautiful pamphlet, and all are summoned with love and delicacy. There’s a matter-of-factness in her writing about loss which makes for touching poems about death and the afterlife. She writes beautifully about female friendship, and there’s humour too.”

Elizabeth Dunford’s poems explore one woman’s attempts to juggle the roles of daughter, mother, grandmother, carer and human being. Tracing her inheritance from her childhood in Northern Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s, she examines family relationships and how they change as parents live into extreme old age and the challenges and rewards of neurodivergence in the home.

Andrew Taylor: “Ramisha Rafique’s poetry allows the reader to immerse themselves in the familiar and the strange, often at the same time. This is a sterling debut, timely in its updating of the role of flânerie and the all-important role of the poet in today’s wider world. We need voices like this.”

Doors open at 6.30 for start at 7pm. Refreshments will be available, and there will be a Five Leaves bookstall.