From Cinderella and her stifling glass slipper to Dorothy’s burden of completing “unfinished men” in The Wizard of Oz, Su Croll’s fourth poetry collection Batten Down depicts women throughout history constrained by the female experience. In a collection fizzing with witchiness, myth, circus, and games of strategy and luck, the curtain is not only pulled back on the anti-feminist nature of cultural narratives, but also on their making, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s use of real birds to attack lead actress Tippi Hedren in the 1963 film The Birds. If there is a line between fact and fiction, Croll’s work expounds its blurriness with both a researched and imaginative eye.

Croll’s voice performs acrobatic feats throughout the text. The speaker’s moxie, seemingly inspired by transatlantic vocabulary of 1920s-1950s cinema, is particularly delicious, with morsels like “straw-headed hoofer” and “a lethal soupçon of homespun / hogwash.” But Croll also knows when to rein it in, such as in a poem about the systematic rape of Gisèle Pelicot. Stark and insistent, the poem reminds us that these events are no mere “story”: “I meant real and factual. / I meant current. I meant contemporary and true.” 

After impressively blending levity and severity, the collection ends on the former with a dialogue between Anne Boleyn and her daughter, Elizabeth I. And while the need to describe the mystical machinations that allow for their beyond-the-grave interaction to occur takes up much of this section, the aim is clear: to inspire hope for the transgenerational fight for women’s freedom. Batten Down’s fairytale world, with its uncanny and off-kilter scenes, may be deceptively close to the one we live in. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be rewritten.mRb