Fran Lock
Fran Lock is a some-time itinerant dog whisperer, the author of numerous chapbooks and thirteen poetry collections, including Hyena! (Poetry Bus Press, 2023), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023, ‘a disgusting lie’: further adventures through the neoliberal hell-mouth (Pamenar Press, 2023) and Contains Mild Peril (Out-Spoken Press, 2019). White/ Other (The 87 Press, 2022), a collection of hybrid lyric riff, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
Fran was the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University (2022-23), researching feral subjectivity through the lens of the medieval bestiary. Fran’s other work includes the chapbook Forever Alive (Dare-Gale Press, 2022), and the critically acclaimed work of ‘queer mourning’ Hyena! Jackal! Dog! (Pamenar Press, 2021).
Fran is Commissioning Editor at the radical arts and culture cooperative Culture Matters, where she most recently edited the mammoth anthology The Cry of the Poor (2021). She is a 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. Fran teaches online for Poetry School, and she is the co-host of the cross-cultural poetry podcast Social yet Distanced with her cousin Jack Varnell. Fran is a super proud pit bull parent. She lives in Kent.
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.
Dogtooth is a book about ghosts. Not in the undead sense, but more as in the spectres and echoes of absent friends. It looks at 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, the folklore we carry and are carried by. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the damage those stories do.
Dogtooth is a book about ghosts. Not in the undead sense, but more as in the spectres and echoes of absent friends. It looks at 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, the folklore we carry and are carried by. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the damage those stories do. Dogtooth is a book about ghosts. Not in the undead sense, but more as in the spectres and echoes of absent friends. It looks at 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, the folklore we carry and are carried by. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the damage those stories do.
Format: epub / mobi
When you purchase this item you will be sent a download link to a zip file containing the ebook in mobi (suitable for Kindle) and epub (suitable for non-Amazon ereaders) format, file must be downloaded within 24hrs.
Terms: We are making these ebook downloads available for personal use and they remain subject to all copyright protections. It is prohibited to use your ebook downloads for (a) the publication, sale, licensing, sub-licensing, renting, transferring, transmission, broadcasting, distribution or redistribution of any ebook in any format; (b) the editing, modification, adaptation or alteration of any ebook (or part thereof) and the creation of any derivative work incorporating any download (or part thereof); (c) the use of any ebook (or part thereof) in a way that is unlawful; (d) any commercial us of any ebook (or part thereof).
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.
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.
Format: epub / mobi
When you purchase this item you will be sent a download link to a zip file containing the ebook in mobi (suitable for Kindle) and epub (suitable for non-Amazon ereaders) format, file must be downloaded within 24hrs.
Terms: We are making these ebook downloads available for personal use and they remain subject to all copyright protections. It is prohibited to use your ebook downloads for (a) the publication, sale, licensing, sub-licensing, renting, transferring, transmission, broadcasting, distribution or redistribution of any ebook in any format; (b) the editing, modification, adaptation or alteration of any ebook (or part thereof) and the creation of any derivative work incorporating any download (or part thereof); (c) the use of any ebook (or part thereof) in a way that is unlawful; (d) any commercial us of any ebook (or part thereof).
In this workshop session we'll be checking in with a poetics of kitsch ephemera and schlocky body horror, as we brave the squishy, pinkly-terrifying realm of the "monstrous cute". Here, we will explore how poets as diverse as Dorothy Molloy, Aase Berg, Chelsey Minnis, Cathy Park-Hong, and Harry Josephine Giles deploy cuteness towards ambivalent and grotesque ends, speaking back to notions of genre, gender, class and kind. We will use the work of these poets as a spur to our own monstrous high-camp inventions. Saturated palettes at the ready! Swap subtly for sequins! And brace for impact.
Price £30
Duration 3 hours
Playback
If you are unable to attend this workshop, we’re pleased to be able to make a session recording available for purchase for limited duration viewing.
Purchase Link
When you purchase this item, you will be directly emailed a link to a document for downloading. This document contains the zoom link for the session. Please note that you should download this document within 24 hours of opening the link otherwise it expires (if you do have any issues with this please email press@outspokenldn.com)
Zoom Recording
Please note that this Zoom session will be recorded. A playback link will be sent afterwards to all participants in that session. Password-protected playback links are also available for purchase for limited duration viewing.
** This listing is for access to the video recording of the workshop only. If you would like to register to attend the workshop on Saturday 5 December 2026, view the listing here: Online Workshop: Run, Don't Walk from the Monstrous Cute! with Fran Lock
If you are unable to attend the online workshop on the day, we’re pleased to make available a playback link to the video recording of the session for standalone purchase.
Purchase
Once you have purchased the Playback, you will receive a link to a document download which includes the link and password for the recording together with the materials from the workshop.
Please note that the password-protected recording will be available to watch for a limited duration of three weeks from the date of the workshop. After this date the video will no longer be available to access.
Once you purchase this item, and after the workshop has taken place, you will be emailed (from press@outspokenpress.com) a link and password to the video recording of the workshop on our Vimeo page. This password-protected video will remain available for viewing for a limited duration of three weeks from the date of the workshop. After this date it will no longer be accessible.
'Run, Don't Walk from the Monstrous Cute!' with Fran Lock
In this workshop session we'll be checking in with a poetics of kitsch ephemera and schlocky body horror, as we brave the squishy, pinkly-terrifying realm of the "monstrous cute". Here, we will explore how poets as diverse as Dorothy Molloy, Aase Berg, Chelsey Minnis, Cathy Park-Hong, and Harry Josephine Giles deploy cuteness towards ambivalent and grotesque ends, speaking back to notions of genre, gender, class and kind. We will use the work of these poets as a spur to our own monstrous high-camp inventions. Saturated palettes at the ready! Swap subtly for sequins! And brace for impact.
Duration 3 hours
In this uncompromising collection of lyric essays, T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet Fran Lock explores and eviscerates historical and cultural links between animality and otherness.
what should i tell you? that feral will not enrich you. that feral will not be mastered. feral is ‘wild’ without utility. it offers nothing, and it asks for nothing in return.
In this uncompromising collection of lyric essays, T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet Fran Lock pulls us with her into the vortex of the ‘feral’. From medieval bestiaries to Poundland, Edmund Spenser to X-Ray Spex, in Vulgar Errors / Feral Subjects Lock explores and eviscerates historical and cultural links between animality and otherness in contexts ranging across class, gender, queerness and Irishness. Overflowing with ‘strange rigour’ and a rage that is ‘tempering hope’ Lock excavates the ways feral is at once both trap and means of liberation.
‘Fran Lock is our savvy sc/avenging angel, undoing the curse of racial capitalism’s stranglehold on language and meaning. Mattering out of place, Vulgar Errors / Feral Subjects is endlessly errant, reminding us that writing is “a verb, not a noun,” immersive, propulsive and absolutely extra. Every line is so alive, so completely itself, it leaps from the page to flare bright & huge as graffiti on every wall until they fall.’ — So Mayer