If you knit, you know

This Is How I Fight is a powerful exploration of femininity without the frills. From the theatre of tight dresses to the mythic lure of makeup, the performance of pulled-out chairs to the falsity of floral apologies, each poem wages war on stereotypes and the status quo.

It is a daring follow-up to Rosie Garland’s 2020 collection What Girls Do in the Dark. And though she’s still fascinated by Romans baking roof tiles and scouring for “arena fodder”, here all roads lead not to Rome but to rebellion. “You do not have to be the silent killer of your tongue,” she insists. “Fuck women having to play nice.” As she explains with compelling precision a few pages later: “My boundaries are hard fought-for and hard-won./ I will not go back to what I came from:/ the deathgrip panic of drowning/ in what I’m told I ought to be, rather than what I am.”

The down-to-earth tone of this Manchester poet doesn’t dull her grand ambitions. As she shatters the mirrors that hold us hostage to expectation, she pieces together, from these broken shards, a vision of women in a more forgiving light. In Cassiopeia, a reimagining of the queen of Greek myth, vanity no longer leads to tragic downfall. Instead, this mother of Andromeda cheers as each “woman gazes/ into [the] mirror and dares to admire what she sees”.

These reflections are coloured by the vivacious candour that carries Garland’s work as a post-punk and cabaret singer, otherwise known as “the Lesbian Vampire Queen”. However, there’s no elaborate disguise here, only a clever motif about clothes that unravels into a gnarly metaphor for pain. In You Can Knit This Lovely Garment, we are reminded of womankind’s ancient secret “code”: “K13. *K2tog. t.b.l. Wl.fwd. K1. Wl.fwd…” (if you knit, you know). Yet this subtle poem also conveys a heart-wrenching code of another sort – the unspoken code of conduct that keeps, as Garland later writes, “the furnace blast” of feeling “bottled up”. “You will not be allowed to cry,” she explains, even if there are “Blind, skinned horses dragging/ their hooves across your chest,” as this grisly knitted garment depicts.

As the author of four novels, Garland knows how to pull the threads of dramatic tension. The most striking twist is when a liberated Virgin Mary steps out from a dusty museum picture frame. The art professors sneer: “How could she leave Jesus in the frame? What sort of mother abandons her own child?” And though these men swab and scrape, desperate to contain the perfume of petrol and power, Mary helps the poet to finally speak her truth. Women might have been “watered down to a whisper”, but here whispers gain force and grow. They not only expose the sorcery of self-erasure, and challenge the patriarchal curse that cast women as witches, but reclaim poetry itself as witchcraft: “a hex of cards and crystal” that shares its wondrous spell.

As Garland is fiery and funny, her poems sparkle with humour too. Particularly amusing is her Autobiography as a Lafayette LX5000 Polygraph Machine and the 3am story of Cruella de Vil in the singles bar – “a tedious drunk” with blotched mascara whose flirting is nothing short of feral. But when the speaker admits that “what I like best is tucked quietly behind all the weird and whirring machinery”, you share in her confession. It’s the raw vulnerability that’s most relatable, rendered all the more precious through her piercing battle cry. This poet might knit, but she won’t submit to limiting patterns.