Fran Lock - In the presence of enemies

 

Fran Lock is a sometime itinerant dog-whisperer and the author of seven poetry collections, most recently the pamphlet Raptures and Captures (Culture Matters, 2019) in collaboration with collage artist Steev Burgess, and Contains Mild Peril (Out-Spoken Press, 2019). She is an associate editor at Culture Matters, and has recently submitted her Ph.D. at Birkbeck College, University of London.

​

Her poem is a prayer, a malediction; the bastard hybrid love-child of Psalm 88 and Blanqui's defense speech of 1832. It represents both a kind of lyric abjection, and maybe also a model of resistance and fugivity. It tries to do what all poems try to do to some extent, to negotiate between the pain felt by an individual, and the radical collective engagement that individual demands. It lives in that territory between the kyrie and the tweet. A territory old as words.