‘Poetry is stupid, but then again, stupidity is not the absence of intellectual ability but rather the scar of its mutilation.’ – Sean Bonney
“… I'm going under. I'm condemned by a society that demands success when all I can offer is failure!” – Zero Mostel as Max Bialystock in The Producers
(Dr) Fran Lock is a some-time itinerant dog-whisperer, cardigan wearer, amateur medievalist, poet, essayist and editor. She is the author of numerous chapbooks and sixteen poetry collections, including Hyena! (Poetry Bus Press, 2023), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023 and the PEN Heaney Prize 2024, and 'a disgusting lie': further adventures through the neoliberal hell-mouth (Pamenar Press, 2023). Her most recent pamphlets are The New Herbal (Blueprint Press, 2024), Love is Stronger than Death (Culture Matters, 2025) and Hag Stone (Dare-Gale, 2025).White/ Other (87 Press, 2022), a book of hybrid prose/ poem riff, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Vulgar Errors/ Feral Subjects, a collection of lyric essays exploring feral subjectivity through the lens of the medieval bestiary, written during her stint as the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University (2022-23), was published late 2023 by Out-Spoken Press. Fran is a Commissioning Editor at radical arts and culture cooperative Culture Matters, and she (now co-) edits the Soul Food column for Communist Review. Fran was a short-lived a member of the new Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.
Blah, blah, blah.
Despite the above, Fran is being crushed by a world that demands success when all she has to offer is failure. Here she'll write about why none of it matters (spoiler warning: the class system), and interrogate her own inability to parlay a bunch of industry tawdries into even the most limited or precarious of long term gains. Along the way expect segues into queer failure, maximum cringe factor, modernism's disavowed pulp twin, the structural underpinnings of otherness, grief-works, the spotted hyena's clitoris, and so much less.
Fran hates the Tories. She lives (mostly) in Kent. If you don’t like that, what’re you even doing here?
https://buymeacoffee.com/fran_feliform_lock
