In Conversation
When Mari Ellis Dunning began drafting the poem that would become Crocodile, she didn’t set out to write a pamphlet. The piece emerged after she read Laura Bates’ Men Who Hate Women, a book that confronted her with the blunt machinery of misogyny and its many masked forms. That initial poem, exploring an abusive relationship from the points of view of victim, perpetrator, and the justice system, became the nucleus of a wider sequence. What began as a submission for a broadside became a full pamphlet published by Rack Press: sharp, urgent, and structurally experimental.
Dunning, who lives in Aberystwyth, is no stranger to exploring gender, trauma, and power through poetry. Her earlier collection Pearl and Bone captured the physical and emotional intensity of pregnancy and new motherhood. Her debut novel Witsh is forthcoming from Honno. She writes in the margins of domestic life: between nappy changes, dog walks, and moments snatched from the noise of family routine. But what Dunning builds in those gaps is far from minor. Her work doesn’t plead for space; it carves it out.
A Need to Make Sense
“Poetry has always been about communication and clarity,” Dunning reflects. Not clarity in the sense of tidy meanings or closed narratives, but as a way of reaching something honest. For her, writing is a way to metabolise the world — to hold space for feelings that don’t always have a name. She wrote Pearl and Bone during the early months of her son’s life, driven not by inspiration but necessity. “I just felt I had to get out all these strange new experiences I was having.”
That compulsion continues in Crocodile. The poems don’t simply narrate harm; they examine the conditions that allow harm to go unchallenged. Dunning doesn’t attempt to resolve these contradictions. Instead, she observes the way language, law, and culture collude in silence.
Writing in the Chaos
With two young children, the image of the poet as isolated, inspired genius is far removed from Dunning’s reality. “I’ve not had the luxury of writing in solitude,” she admits. “My writing usually happens in fits and starts — a line might come to me while I’m walking the dog.” She jots thoughts on napkins, the backs of receipts, scraps of notebooks. A first draft might arrive in one burst, or get assembled slowly between making coffee and folding laundry.
“I’m a scattered, multi-tasking, buzzy sort of person,” she says. “So it works for me.” There’s no waiting for the muse. Instead, Dunning leans into the texture of everyday life and uses it as fuel. This responsiveness, this porousness to her own surroundings, keeps the work grounded — even when it veers into allegory or satire.
Influence, Admiration, and Literary Lineage
Dunning’s admiration for poets like Natalie Ann Holborow and Joanna Ingham is grounded in their use of startling imagery. Holborow’s capacity to juxtapose beauty and brutality resonates with Dunning’s own poetics. Ingham’s work is never far from her mind — she even keeps a quote from Fontanelle as her laptop wallpaper.
And then there’s Sylvia Plath. “I hate to be a stereotype,” she laughs, “but I’m also going to say Sylvia Plath. I’d be lying otherwise.” Like many writers who found their footing through Plath’s relentless interiority and sonic precision, Dunning doesn’t idolise her so much as acknowledge her influence. Discovering Plath cracked something open — the idea that the personal could be uncompromising, and still be poetry.
Political Poetics and the Problem of Voice
Crocodile doesn’t shout. It dissects. The poems use satire and metaphor — particularly the recurring figure of the crocodile — to explore how violence is excused, aestheticised, or simply absorbed by systems built to protect power. “What I was trying to do, ultimately,” Dunning says, “was shed light on this hugely pervasive culture which doesn’t get enough attention in the media or in popular culture, and equip myself with a voice to challenge these ideals.”
That drive is not without difficulty. One poem, responding to an incel quote claiming women are the devil, initially took the voice of the incel himself. But the result felt wrong. “I didn’t want to give a voice to that mindset,” she explains. Reframing the piece as a satirical female response made it land with more force — and more integrity.
For Dunning, poetry can be a political act, though she’s careful not to conflate urgency with obligation. She feels the pressure of world events — the genocide in Gaza, for instance — but sometimes lacks the language to respond directly. Gender-based violence is personal; it’s lived. “It’s something I feel equipped to speak about,” she says, “because I’ve experienced it.”
Instinct, Craft, and the Ongoing Work
When it comes to process, Dunning sees instinct and craft as intertwined. Instinct gets the line down. Craft shapes it. “I often find I won’t commit anything to paper until I’m happy with the sound of it in my mind,” she says, “but of course edits will still follow.” Reading work aloud is central to that process. Cadence matters! The moment a poem feels done isn’t when it feels perfect, but when nothing feels wrong anymore.
That said, she often revises pieces during live readings. Earlier work feels distant, unfinished. “It’s never done,” she admits. “The sooner we learn to accept that, the better.”
Dunning’s relationship with feedback is equally fluid. A small group of trusted poet friends helps her see her own work afresh. Sometimes their encouragement is what she needs to stop tinkering. Other times, it confirms what she already suspected — that something isn’t quite working.
Looking Forward
What’s next is less a project than a pull. Dunning is thinking about experimentation — how to push her work into new formal territories without losing accessibility. She cites Fiona Benson’s Zeus poems as a source of inspiration: bold in form, brutal in subject, uncompromising in language. That edge appeals. But whatever comes next, it will likely emerge the way her best work always has — line by line, in stolen moments, with honesty at its core.
In Critique
Mari Ellis Dunning’s Crocodile is a compact, carefully sequenced work that moves with a controlled, cutting rhythm. Built from fragments that shift between lyric, grotesque vignette and procedural satire, the text examines coercive control through shifting perspectives. It begins in the body, moves into allegory, and ends in institutional rhetoric. The hybrid form holds that trajectory together. It’s not ornamental. The fractured structure serves the subject.
Structure and Narrative Strategy
The collection opens with Girl, which is split into four stanzas that resist chronology. Each reads like a moment caught mid-thought. There’s no clear entry point. The poem begins with ‘and how did it begin / this insidious thing‘, a line that lands without context. The syntax falters and pulls us into the speaker’s confusion. The repeated ‘how did it…’ creates a rhythm that mimics obsessive rethinking. There’s no exposition, only aftermath.
The crocodile metaphor emerges gradually. At first, it reads as grotesque flourish. But it accrues meaning across the collection. This isn’t just predator-as-symbol. It’s used to explore camouflage, charm, and survival. ‘their teeth / always grow back‘ becomes more than just an image of violence, it points to cycles of harm and recovery, to the impossibility of disarmament.
Diction and Tone
The language is tightly controlled. Dunning draws from anatomical and animal vocabularies without slipping into excess. Phrases like ‘smoothed his osteoderms‘ or ‘fish bones caught / between my teeth’ land not as decoration but as emotional textures. Dunning doesn’t reach for spectacle. Her tone holds steady, even when the content disturbs. That tonal restraint is part of what gives the work its weight.
The courtroom sections (Justice, Judge’s Report) show a tonal shift. Here, the voice becomes more satirical, colder. The language mimics official rhetoric. ‘There are nuances we must consider‘ is a line taken straight from the vocabulary of deflection. The metaphor of the crocodile continues, but now he’s ‘a great swimmer‘, ‘slick / as an eel in the water’. The logic is familiar, and that familiarity is what makes it land. The poetry here doesn’t just describe; it performs the mechanisms of excuse and erasure.
Syntax and Rhythm
Dunning uses form to manage pace and breath. Enjambment and line breaks are used sparingly but to effect. In [HOW TO GET THE GIRL: PART 3], the rhythm quickens:
Mother told me not to play
with my food but how could I miss
the opportunity to toy with something
so delectable?
There’s an almost playful cadence to this stanza, which sits uneasily with its content. The rhythm mimics teasing. It becomes part of the power play.
Later, in On getting away with it, repetition becomes the main structural device. The phrase ‘boys will be boys’ is repeated in block stanzas, unpunctuated. The rhythm here is mechanical, numbing. It doesn’t develop; it insists. The point is not progression but saturation. The choice to hold to one phrase, unbroken, becomes its own form of accusation.
Imagery and Symbol
Imagery across the sequence shifts between religious, mythic, and anatomical registers. Carnal reworks the story of Eve as the root of patriarchal suspicion, but grounds that myth in modern spaces: ‘nightclubs and alleyways‘, ‘lipstick-smeared’. Dunning doesn’t rely on symbol for distance. She brings myth close to the body.
The crocodile functions as more than just a stand-in for an abuser. He becomes a courtroom favourite, a misunderstood athlete, a boy with dimples. These shifts aren’t just metaphorical. They reflect how language and law allow certain figures to reframe themselves. Meanwhile, the speaker’s body becomes less stable, more porous. It bleeds, weeps, is doubted.
Risks and Control
There are some moments where the metaphor verges on strain. That is to say that the crocodile carries a heavy symbolic load. He is at once animal, lover, legal subject, and cultural darling. At points, these overlays feel close to collapsing under their own weight. But, Dunning often anticipates this. The text doesn’t just use symbols; it questions them. It shows how metaphors can distort as much as they reveal.
The refusal to name the abuser feels intentional. The predator is always ‘he’ or ‘Crocodile’. This could distance the reader from the specifics, but here it serves a different purpose. It refuses narrative neatness. The focus is on repetition, not resolution.
Closing Remarks
Ultimately, Crocodile is tightly composed and formally inventive. It uses metaphor not for adornment but as a means of pressure. Dunning does this right. This suite doesn’t invite catharsis. It presents trauma in systems: personal, legal, cultural, and refuses to offer easy distinctions between them. Dunning’s choices are deliberate. The structure holds. The voice doesn’t waver.
There’s no gesture toward healing or closure. The collection doesn’t offer relief. It observes, interrogates, and holds its ground.
There’s precision here, and patience. And that is what makes the work hold.
