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

About 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.