This Is How I Fight

The Observer Poetry Book of the Month June 2025

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.