Fran Lock

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. There's folklore in it, the current that we carry and that which carries us; the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the damage those stories can do. It's...

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...