Fran Lock is the former Judith E, Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University (2022-2023), and the author of thirteen poetry collections, most recently 'a disgusting lie' (further adventures through the neo-liberal hell mouth), published by Pamenar Press in September 2023. She is 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. A collection of essays exploring feral subjectivity through the lens of the medieval bestiary is forthcoming from Out-Spoken Press later this year. Fran is an Associate Editor at the arts and culture cooperative, Culture Matters. She lives with Manny, her beloved pit bull and eternal muse.  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.

Jackqueline Frost is an emerging force in poetry and criticism. A queer-feminist author living in France and scholar of Caribbean culture and politics, Frost writes about the revolutions of the past and future. She is the author of the full-length collection, The Antidote (Compline Editions), and several chapbooks including You Have the Eyes of a Martyr (O’clock Press), The Third Event Pt. 1 & 2, (Tripped Press) and The Third Event Pt. 3 (Crater Press).    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.’

Dual language book. German translation by Lotta Thiessen   “I wanted to remember how to forget:   I found something I thought I knew well—   the colour of a childhood room; the path taken to school each day; a pool of water collecting in the iris,   —took something: lines of a poem or the pages of a book, placed them in these spaces I thought I knew well.   I had to train myself, I couldn’t carry all the pages—”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

Translated from French by Patrick Love 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.