This Is How I Fight

by Rosie Garland

How do we maintain connection in challenging times? This Is How I Fight by Rosie Garland encounters the wild and untamed, the creatures of night - and the beasts that lurk within us. Here, the poems interrogate gods, heroines, villains and monsters. Through desire and escape, we encounter women on fire, girlhood dreams of horses, oracles, vampires and saints, and a cast of characters – from Eurydice, Mrs Danvers, Spock, the Virgin Mary and Cruella De Vil.

Garland invites us to travel into deep space, push back at suffocating expectations, dress up for a dinner date with Fear, and seek illumination rather than the hammering down of simplistic answers. Here is the transformative and life-changing act of saying No, of embracing the finite nature of being alive, and the power in staking your own place in the story. Through a queer perspective, we shift between human and other, from fiction, truth and magic. These poems explore where we might find the courage needed to forge a way through the world, one word in front of the other, proposing kindness as a radical act.

Poetry Book of the Month, The Observer

121 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 19, 2025

About the author

Born in London to a runaway teenager, Rosie has always been a cuckoo in the nest. She's an eclectic writer and performer, ranging from singing in post-punk gothic band The March Violets, through touring with the Subversive Stitch exhibition in the 90s to her alter-ego Rosie Lugosi the Vampire Queen, cabaret chanteuse and mistress of ceremonies.

She has published five solo collections of poetry and her award-winning short stories, poems and essays have been widely anthologized. She is winner of the DaDa Award for Performance Artist of the Year and a Poetry Award from the People's Café, New York. Her most recent poetry collection, 'Everything Must Go' (Holland Park Press 2012) draws on her experience of throat cancer.

She won the Mslexia Novel competition in 2012 and her debut novel 'The Palace of Curiosities' was published in March 2013 by HarperCollins. Her second novel, 'Vixen', (Borough Press 2014) is now available in all formats.

Reviews

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sharp and rich, offering perspectives on an engaging array of characters and ideas. A really strong collection.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rosie Garland’s recent collection of poetry pulls deeply from the well of mythology, legend, classics, and biblical verse to explore female archetypes like the witch, the goddess, the muse, the saint, as well as the domestic roles of wife, mother, and daughter. Women are dualities, juxtaposed as both victim and hero, giver and receiver, as the harsh reality of adulthood clashes with childhood idealism. In Garland’s vision, the setting is sometimes gritty and seedy, other times pristine and vast, and the landscape is dotted with the relics of history and art, as well as symbols of underground pop culture. The interplay of modernity and antiquity, urgency and hesitation, flow like the waxing and waning moon, as monsters (both real and imagined, human and unearthly) lurk in the shadows, cloaked, until their true names are revealed. Garland exposes the potential power in naming a thing or a being, and how the act of revealing or concealing one’s identity can have unexpected outcomes in myth and in life. The poet references class and caste, and the struggle of the individual against family and tradition. Her British-ness comes through in the tone and wit of her writing, but her themes are universal, such as the evolving nature of expectation and the anticipation of things to come, and the role of ritual in both the fantastical and the mundane world. Her style is visceral and sensual - richly describing the taste, touch, sound and scent of her world, and the poems draw the reader into the powerful final piece. Highly recommended!