Dogtooth is a book about ghosts: ghosts as in the spectres and echoes of absent friends, but also as in the discomforts, paranoias and phobias that haunt a very particular cultural moment. It's a book about fear, about a background static of suspicion. It's about the twin anxieties of identity and assimilation.
Contains Mild Peril is a book permeated by anxiety, not fatal threat, but the ambient manic hum of daily life. Precarity does something to us at the level of language; it shapes the ways we see and say. Our current climate - political, environmental, economic - engenders its own nervy music. These poems channel this collective apprehension in ways both deeply personal and instantly familiar. It is a collection that abounds in loss, in a sense of being lost, and in the gnawing fear of losing, yet its speakers address us with urgency. This is language in the throes of fighting back.
Exploring themes of cultural identity and belonging, this narrative delves into the struggles of assimilation and the emotional turmoil of feeling caught between two worlds. It serves as an elegy for those grappling with their imperfect integration into society, highlighting the pain of not fully belonging to either their heritage or their current environment. The characters navigate their complexities, embodying the conflict of cultural duality and the search for acceptance.
Lyric essays by Fran Lock on subject of the Feral in context of queer, Irish, Gypsy Romani Traveler, working class people and women.
"White/ Other is a strange hybrid beast - part poetry, part polemic, part sectarian graffiti - a long lyric essay that grapples with the complexities of writing and living from the position of the absent subject: that is the white working-class "other" within neo-liberal culture. White/ Other is memoir remixed, cut up and spliced with passages of cultural analysis and moments of feral lyric riff to ask what it means to be politically reviled, socially abjected, and economically disenfranchised, alive at the sharp end of everything, language included." -- publisher's description