Poetry essays by Fran Lock
//////  202 pages
Size:    14 x 21 CM 
 
The Hyena! poems are concerned with therianthropy – the magical transformation of people into animals – as a metaphor for the embodied effects of sudden and traumatic loss. Through the figure of Hyena! Fran negotiates the multiple fraught intersections of dirty animality, femininity, grief, class and culture to produce a work of queer mourning, a furious feral lament. Hyenas in legend and lore are shape-shifters, and Fran's work has been said to shape-shift between lyric and innovative modes, fiercely concerned with the expansion of "innovative" to include the kinds of poetry and performance strategy typically accessible to and practiced by working-class and marginalised people.
 
Inspired by the rich web of folklore surrounding the hyena, an animal whose reputation spans from loathsome savage to magical sex-shifter, Lock finds in this creature a figure of kinship, relating its fabled shape-changing properties to the emotional and bodily fluctuations of grief— the grief of and for those rejected or refused by neoliberal society. Emerging from the polarizing isolation of our pandemic times, Lock's work of "queer mourning" cuts through the grimey sheen of performative Instagram politics and all its unbothered authenticators.
 
 
 Fran Lock is the former Judith E, Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University (2022-2023), and the author of thirteen poetry collections, most recently 'a disgusting lie' (further adventures through the neo-liberal hell mouth), published by Pamenar Press in September 2023. She is member of the New Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, and she edits the Soul Food column for Communist Review. A collection of essays exploring feral subjectivity through the lens of the medieval bestiary is forthcoming from Out-Spoken Press later this year. Fran is an Associate Editor at the arts and culture cooperative, Culture Matters. She lives with Manny, her beloved pit bull and eternal muse.