18:30

Monitor & Present Tense host an evening of readings to celebrate Fatema Abdoolcarim’s Tremble (Monitor, 2025). With Fatema Abdoolcarim, Helen Charman, Rebecca Hurst, and Eve Esfandiara-Denney.

Food, drinks & books available to purchase at Present Tense.

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Tremble, Fatema Abdoolcarim’s debut collection of poems, is an intimate and involving sequence on fertility and faith. A memoir in verse, these poems relate encounters with the animal other, the uncertain, but always echoing the tender rituals of family, food, prayer. Abdoolcarim thinks through what it means to care – and to mother – at a time where atrocity makes those systems of loving seem out of reach. Tremble traces the sensual and unknown spaces of desire, creating a hopeful lyric in spaces of private and global loss.