Dogtooth

by Fran Lock

Dogtooth is a book about ghosts. Not in the undead sense, but more as in the spectres and echoes of absent friends. It looks at 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, the folklore we carry and are carried by. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the damage those stories do.

Genres: Poetry

75 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 21, 2019

Reviews

[Tôpher Mills · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Uplinked real-time nonversation' is the banging opening poem about talking via the internet to a friend who's at her sister's wedding. Full of slating descriptions, misunderstandings and wayward alcoholic zingers ('Adding insult to Ian Dury). Her language is something to get delightfully lost in. A carousal for the senses that sets your mind reeling. Whether she's having a 'flarf' or, as in the title poem 'Dogtooth', ('your chipped tooth whistling like bottles on an allotment') creating a sonic simile, Fran Lock's modernism shines through without losing any of her working-class sensibility. She is one of those poets whose books I want to read before they've even been published.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

cohort

there will be no poetry. i will not rise in light the colour

of medical waste, with blood’s black cartridge low on ink,

to sing the aggrotastic wassail of working-class catchment;

to sing the asymmetric faces of all those truant youth who

dined on fire. there will be no poetry, or only for those

petrol-headed prodigies of somnolence, boys on gaunt

corners, solanine and gobshite, gasping in alleyways, their

hands sweating currency at three a.m. when blue light

bathes the deviated streets like tiger balm. if there is poetry,

it will be in the lowbrow necromancy of estates, terraces that

shape themselves from bloated gloaming, broken windows;

chain-smoking and pallid stagnation; from crude, two-

fingered benedictions, dispensed by holy idiots. if i sing,

i will sing for the boys whose lisping chivalries the upright

boroughs shun for fear of plague; for frail and vacant boys,

howling in a solvent ague, chafing, baste in sweat and wasted

again through all the hungry hours we knocked on wood to.

my boys, who, keening in the paralytic standstill after curfew,

balk at love’s fraudulent portion, when summer’s heat defrosts

a sorry longing in the heart. do you understand? for the boys

whose raw, shop-lifted nerve trembles with desperate jetlag;

whose breath is a silvery pesticide, who wear a chemically

tenderized skin. there will be no poetry, unless for them,

folding in their locust limbs in doorways, treating their

secrets with bleach in cemeteries underneath the cherry

blossom. boys who break in grimy waves along the south

bank of the thames, their narrow backs arching like bardic

harps, who walk in staggered jackets, the tired, unvaried

tedium of august; who crawled the body’s slow-witted

acre, pining in a forest, on a carpet of needles, ostracised,

besotted; their yellow faces caving in like sandcastles, brains

behaving like hydrogen. this is the music of my witness.

friends i have lost to the maledicted mufti of unemployment

blackspots. boys, whose stooped regalia gave them away,

dressed in poverty’s erring fashion: ashy face and earring;

friends, whose desolated smiles disgorge a hardboiled fist

of stars, an anti-english spit embracing broken teeth. these

are the boys with numb lips bending local cant like spoons,

swept up in grief’s swooning pheromone, horny and crooning,

a little in love with violence, fizzing with an aggravated

lambency, forsaking clinics for brixton, the lairy aquarium

light of bars, of clubs. boys, whose sooty humour groomed

itself in station toilets; lived by hooch, by gear, and by the

wheedling grammar of an underpass at elephant. i will sing

for them, as they fall between london’s grim chimneys;

the shrill and mildewed air of social housing, days spent

nursing hung-over hemispheres, digesting regret in the

microwavable guts of melamine kitchens. cold potatoes,

newsprint on the fingers. there will be no poetry if not for

a limping, malingering kiss; for afternoons immense with

vendetta, the hoary feuds they bristled with in car parks

and in stairwells; courting the moribund alchemy of smack

or of meth or jellies, downed with vodka’s dicey clarity.

a neat buzz they tilt at windmills. i will sing this song, no

other. this city does not want them, its poetry a tide of

numbers, zeroes replenished like dry martinis, like artisan

coffee, a cool you’d split your lip on. a cup you crumple

into waste; the dregs they’ve scried the depths of. this

city does not want us, who file like black ants along

the crisp green edge of need, who are naked inside of

need’s skirmishing velocity, who come apart at the speed

wet paper tears. there will be no poetry. you cannot cross

my palm and reconcile a coin. i bear my misaffection

like a grass’s scar. i wear disgust like a velvet glove

[Ciarán Hodgers · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly stunning collection, a way with words I've never seen before