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.

If Hyena! Jackal! Dog! (2021) tendered a feral poetics through the lens of therianthropy, then ‘a disgusting lie’ is concerned with animality in its most abject and excessive forms. Hyena! returns, but changed, not merely beastly, but monstrous: physically, psychically, morally, and politically. This Hyena!, like all monstrous bodies, knocks aside her receiving subjects, gestures to a terrifying excess of meaning beyond all of those tired canons of the “natural”.   With her habitual disregard for the language of accommodation or catharsis, Lock interrogates what it means to inhabit an impossible (queer) body within a (politically) unbearable present. ‘a disgusting lie’ is preoccupied with violence as both a rhetorical and territorial strategy – all the weakly murderous uses English is put to – and with the smug inertness of literature’s response.   The phrase ‘a disgusting lie’ is taken from Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy, and the notion that without ‘sincere passion, the heroism of self-sacrifice, and the unity of thought, word, and deed’ revolutionism ‘inevitably degenerates into rhetoric and becomes a disgusting lie’. Yet Lock is – at best – an ambivalent subscriber to this school of thought; her disgust is capacious, and she bestows it with as much energy on the sentimental overtures of extremism as on the guarded and self-regarding soundbites of “moderates”.   What drives Lock’s poetry, however savage or uncompromising, is a fierce and compassionate regard for the ill-used o/Other in our midst; those whose minds and bodies cannot or will not reproduce the values and forms neoliberalism wills on them.   In Dead Girl Industrial Complex, the final section of the book, voices of murdered women and girls break out in strange and puzzling polyphony. Featuring a cast of characters including the Babylonian Goddess Tiamat, and the alleged sixteenth century witch, Mary Bateman, strips of whose skin were tanned into leather and sold to bind books – specifically The Hurt of Sedition and Arcadian Princess – following her execution, this section of the book is perhaps the darkest and most troubling, yet it is also the funniest, full of rangy wit, slant asides, knowing winks, and Lock’s characteristic word-play. Lock uses language to undo it, to return its hex three-fold to sender. Hyena! wants a grammar of irrational possibility, to carve a space in and through poetry for a feral commons.

Young Americans by Jackqueline Frost is a poetry collection that conjures a present teeming with the decadent violence of the confederate South   The book is a narrative of becoming in the wartime petroleum landscape of southern Louisiana. Faulknerian in its themes and in its taste for the baroque, Frost’s lyric explores the melancholy of ‘belonging to the enormous bliss of American death’ in places where one must ‘learn what love is from what it is not.’

THIS ENERGY WASTED BY FLIGHT​​— traces the trying of language: “first as fact, / then as claim; then finally as call.” Consisting of a long poem and a short essay, the book attempts to both unravel and complicate the she that speaks: gendered experience and its relationship to fragmented memory and the violence of narrative time; to sexual violence; to surveillance and grief; to solitude and collectivity; to song and dissent. "What if the hour is left incomplete?" asks the speaker, twisting and turning through the past, present and future all at once in its possession and simultaneous dispossession of the “‘I am.’ / ‘We are.’”. Oscillating between the gestures of daily experience, and the political and social conditions that shape it, both unflinchingly utopian and wildly sceptical in its outlook, THIS ENERGY WASTED BY FLIGHT— attempts to write through the continual negotiation between the desire to speak and the desire to keep your mouth shut, all the time chasing what it means to live out one's political convictions through poetry, and through life.    "THIS ENERGY WASTED BY FLIGHT— is thought turned [into] song. The singer, an ‘ambivalent woman / of non personhood’, trusts the productive energy of doubt to take her deeper into feeling and farther from naming. Lotte LS reveals the violent imperatives placed on us to speak and inhabit our pains as the limits of our personhood. In tracing the ‘tyranny of language under capitalist authoritarianism’ what emerges is the chance to become a subject always in motion, one who knows that what is not remembered is not identical to what is forgotten. " --Mira Mattar

Through lyric poems, prose poems and fragments, performance scores and visual collages, Mille Regretz writes towards, through and around the chansons of the Renaissance composer Josquin des Prez. Employing a translatory approach that draws on Josquin’s own procedural compositions, this book takes the ‘dubious and spurious’ nature of the chansons’ printed scores and partial lyrics as a starting point and an invitation to reimagine the relationship between poetry and song. The poems move centrifugally from past to present across the verbal, visual and sonic, welcoming chance encounters and mishearings into the process of making; they are, as Wilkes writes in the afterword, “a kind of opening to the world.”

Recovery is an exhibition, an inquiry, a translative text. It seeks to vivify experience through a politics of gayness and an active demonstration of queerness. It engages with, in Marcel Mauss’s term, “techniques of the body,” from discrete gestures to athletic maneuvers and intimate caresses. By exploring weakness, it reshapes everyday actions and words into poetic acts of recovery.   The book begins in the diverse: Recovery is comprised of tracks (as in skiing, as in DJ-ing, as in walking) that readers are free to mix, to dance on, or to roam around in. Its prose, its poetry, its essays, and its translations are like method air. As in skateboarding, you are alone on your board, you ride the curbs, you jump the obstacles, you alley-oops (from the French “allez hop”), or you do darkslides, and yet you are never alone; you are doing it with other skateboarders. A painter painting alone in front of a cave looks like one of the rocks; onomatopoeias seem universal, but are not; a poem in Persian gets translated into a collaboration.   Recovery was published originally in France as Récupérer. This English edition, translated by Cole Swensen and augmented by texts written directly in English by the author and collaborators, has been transformed to adapt to this new context.  

Al Haschische is a vivid and beguiling work by Safaa Fathy, a multi-talented artist who seamlessly delves into personal, humanitarian, and metaphysical matters through trance-inducing lyricism. Reminiscent of Benjamin's Über Haschisch, the book employs Hashish as a catalyst for interpretation, taking us on a journey into the depths of places, plants, and people within the realm of Language. Drawing inspiration from her experimental film, Hidden Valley, Fathy skilfully integrates stills that offer a visual, verbal, and textual glimpse into her quest. Al Haschische serves as an exploration of dreams, madness, and the intricate musings of the mind through an investigative and psychic travel. Its pages invite us to encounter elemental forces, ranging from the enigmatic Canticle Prophet to the interplay of shadows and remedies, employing hypnosis against a backdrop of a mesmerizing blue curtain. Fathy's poetic work beautifully underscores the notion that the body is the primordial abode of words, while the term "haschiche" resonates with profound significance throughout.