Nine Arches Press
Adventures in poetry
This Is How I Fight
Rosie Garland
The Observer Poetry Book of the Month, June 2025
ISBN: 9781916760189
eISBN: 9781916760196
Price: £11.99
Publication date: 19th June 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Territories: World
Extent: 72pp
DCF: Poetry Collections
Cover artwork by Ali White
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.
Praise for This Is How I Fight:
'Rosie Garland has a vast and playful imagination, her new collection a shadowed labyrinth of obsidian mirrors, quantum physics and Whack-a-Mole. Watch out: behind the vampires and verve there prowls a relentless compassion that may seize you at any moment and lift you to the stars.' - John McCullough
'A galloping collection that looks beneath the skin of a woman to the multitudes inside - galaxies, creatures, queens, ghosts, little lost girls and sheer fire - all itching and roaring to be seen.' - Caroline Bird
‘Breathless audacity gallops in these poems; their hearts are made of glowing, animate matter. Nothing could be more important than this, in a time when we most need to see proof of our love: Rosie Garland's This Is How I Fight supplies it, in wonder and spectacle, in jagged defiance and binary deconstructions that spark their own necessary fires. How ferociously grateful I am that these poems exist; how urgently we in the world require them for our shared survival.’ - Shivanee Ramlochan
Rosie Garland has a passion for language nurtured by public libraries. She writes poetry, short and long fiction, song lyrics and things that fall between and outside. She sings with post-punk band The March Violets. Poetry collection What Girls Do in the Dark (Nine Arches Press) was shortlisted for the Polari Prize 2021. Her latest novel The Fates (Quercus) is a retelling of the Greek myth of the Fates, and Val McDermid has named her one of the most compelling LGBT+ writers in the UK today. In 2023, she was made a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature. http://www.rosiegarland.com/
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Rosie Garland’s dauntless and enthralling new poetry collection, What Girls Do in the Dark, invites us to leap into deep space - across a universe where light, names, place and time become the “distance between things that stand like sisters”. We venture through strange night-time transformations, between northerly points and places of being and not-being. In a twilight alive with glimmering energy, we discover not just outer-space, but inner space – where the body and the self are made of infinite galaxies, illuminated for the briefest blink of a life.
Find out more about What Girls Do In The Dark
The Nine Arches Press blog features poems from many of our poets, as well as interviews and articles.
