Released 31st May, 2025 // 44 pages // 978-1-917617-06-2 // RRP: £9.99
Rhian Elizabeth’s maybe i’ll call gillian anderson is a raw, darkly funny, and deeply affecting collection that navigates the liminal spaces of love, loss, and reinvention. With a voice that is both unguarded and sharply observant, Elizabeth crafts poems that move through heartbreak, motherhood, memory, and self-destruction with biting wit and aching tenderness. Whether tracing the ghosts of past selves, confronting absence, or yearning for connection, these poems refuse sentimentality, instead offering something braver—an intimacy that is as unsparing as it is humane.
PRAISE for maybe i'll call gillian anderson:
A poetic memoir like a rush of honesty to the heart (or Gillian Anderson’s answerphone.)
— Caroline Bird
I know when I am reading a good book because I swear a lot, silently, inside my head, about the author’s intelligence and craft, how it is held so lightly, how it touches you so deeply. I know it’s truly good when I want to tell as many people as I can that it is laugh-out loud funny and sad, playful and intelligent - and yes, it’s about parenting, and growing up, all the selves we can be in two decades, how sublime we are and how horribly faulty, how this is a book about love. But mostly I just want to tell you – this book is so good. This book is so bloody good
— Clare Shaw
These poems are lyric detonations, excavating constellations of family and strangers, riding the line between reality and lie, holding small worlds but loving big.
— Tishani Doshi
Rhian Elizabeth’s poems are personal and playful, tender and fierce. She writes about love, loss and the kindness of strangers. There’s an intimacy to these poems, and such honesty and insight, I defy anyone not to be moved.
— Paul Burston
Punchy assured stuff. The writing is clear and direct, leading us effortlessly to all the murk and mulch of life. More please!
— Luke Wright
ABOUT Rhian Elizabeth:
Rhian Elizabeth is a trainee counsellor and a writer. Her debut novel, Six Pounds Eight Ounces, was published in 2014 by Seren Books and is currently being adapted for TV, and there are the poetry collections the last polar bear on earth, published in 2018 by Parthian Books, and girls etc., by Broken Sleep Books in 2024. Her prose and poetry have been listed in various competitions and prizes and appeared in many magazines and anthologies worldwide, as well as being featured on BBC Radio 4’s PM programme. She was named by The Welsh Agenda as one of Wales’ Rising Stars—one of 30 people working to make Wales better over the next 30 years. She is a Hay Festival Writer at Work and was previously Writer in Residence at the Coracle International Literary Festival in Tranås, Sweden.
