Beastly Detachment in Fran Lock’s 'Hyena! Jackal! Dog!'
When speaking of what makes up the poetics of Hyena! Jackal! Dog!, one can’t possibly be any more efficient than Fran Lock’s own introduction to the book, an essay named “Hyena! and the work of queer mourning.” Lock sets up the book thoroughly through a brief ethnomythography of the Hyena across the globe, offering a truly heart wrenching opening to a beastly narrative of the queer body in transformation.
The book is divided into the three chapters of “Hyena,” “Jackal,” and “Dog,” each of which embody their own poetics. Lock begins the narrative in rage, seated firmly within the revolutionary position of “Hyena,” a frame enforced to bring Queerness back to its literal meaning of alienation. Through this enforced poetic frame of “Hyena,” the queer subject, here emphatically a woman, becomes queer only in their alienation from the world that they strive so hard to be a part of. The chapter named “Hyena” is therefore more a painting than a poem, more an illustration than text. “Hyena,” then, becomes the breath with which Lock speaks.
However, throughout the book Lock’s poetics are slowly domesticated as she moves from the frame of Hyena: a harbinger of chaos, to an assimilated agent of chaos itself: the dog. These poetics build towards the completed transformation of a Dog. In “Dog,” the body, in its frivolous novelty, opens up to new violent opportunities for the Queer woman. Having completed a profound revolution, the body returns to a beastly detachment to the world which it serves. The book then ends with the chapter “Dog”, a narrative that will be developed further perhaps in the release of the book’s second volume in 2023 by Pamenar Press.
Lock shares a lexicon with the punks, with Harroway, with Solanas, with all the loudest voices against heteropatriarchal forces that control the economics of gendered anger. In “Hyena! outro rockstar rant” we read, “the hashtags of corporate hygiene, / go fuck yourselves. I cut my teeth/ in a plague year, bitches. I’m done/ with your choric conniving, poetry.” Lock isn’t only fed up with the male scholarship that suppresses the anger of all but the cis male, she is also fed up with the narrative of poetry and poetics and its performative move towards the political. Lock dislikes the canon itself. In “Hyena commitments,” we read: “A hyena is not political. is the fog at the back of the throat, / not nearly a word, a syndrome.” For Lock therefore, the declarative political, as used in the text, is itself an apparatus of oppression; it is a performative tool of the intellectual to wield against oppressed bodies.
If the frame of the “Hyena” was the stream, then the section “Jackal” moves the discourse slightly to the undercurrent and becomes a subtitle to “Hyena,” in both form and content. Where “Hyena” was formed in statements and a breaking of the dam where decades of queer anger were pouring through, “Jackal” starts to interact with the reader and with the page itself. These interactions are in the form of subtitles, questions and conversations that aren’t alien to a majority of what the publisher, Pamenar Press has published.
We end in the section “Dog”, where the beastly has disappeared on the surface. Whereas the textual “Hyena” and the subtextual “Jackal” prominently interacted with their titular frameworks, “Dog” gathers the beastly narrative into a single tale of urban Wilderness. The book culminates with the queer woman floating through, still angry, but rid of the will towards transformation.
Through Hyena! Jackal! Dog!, Fran Lock creates a one-of-a-kind narrative of beastly queers in their original sense of alienation. Hyena! Jackal! Dog! is a book of great importance to narratives of abjection, alienation and queerness, and a true gem worthy of much attention.
Hyena! Jackal! Dog! is available now for purchase at Pamenar Press’s website and in bookstores across Canada.
ISBN: 9781916228139
Genre: Poetry Essays
Pub date: September 30, 2021
Book Review
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February 14,
2023
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6-minute read
Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi
(They/them) is an Iranian-born, Toronto-based poet, writer and translator.