Pamenar Press

Cover

Al Haschische is a vivid work by Safaa Fathy, an artist who seamlessly moves within the 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.

‘a disgusting lie’
(further adventures throughthe neoliberal hell mouth)
Fran Lock
/////// 226Pages
14.8 x 21 CM
ISBN: 978-1-915341-09-9


If Hyena! Jackal! Dog! (2021) tendered a feral poetics through the lens of therianthropy, then ‘a disgusting lie’ is concerned with animality in its most abject and excessive forms. Hyena! returns, but changed, not merely beastly, but monstrous: physically, psychically, morally, and politically. This Hyena!, like all monstrous bodies, knocks aside her receiving subjects, gestures to a terrifying excess of meaning beyond all of those tired canons of the “natural”.

With her habitual disregard for the language of accommodation or catharsis, Lock interrogates what it means to inhabit an impossible (queer) body within a (politically) unbearable present. ‘a disgusting lie’ is preoccupied with violence as both a rhetorical and territorial strategy – all the weakly murderous uses English is put to – and with the smug inertness of literature’s response.

The phrase ‘a disgusting lie’ is taken from Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy, and the notion that without ‘sincere passion, the heroism of self-sacrifice, and the unity of thought, word, and deed’ revolutionism ‘inevitably degenerates into rhetoric and becomes a disgusting lie’. Yet Lock is – at best – an ambivalent subscriber to this school of thought; her disgust is capacious, and she bestows it with as much energy on the sentimental overtures of extremism as on the guarded and self-regarding soundbites of “moderates”.

What drives Lock’s poetry, however savage or uncompromising, is a fierce and compassionate regard for the ill-used o/Other in our midst; those whose minds and bodies cannot or will not reproduce the values and forms neoliberalism wills on them.

In Dead Girl Industrial Complex, the final section of the book, voices of murdered women and girls break out in strange and puzzling polyphony. Featuring a cast of characters including the Babylonian Goddess Tiamat, and the alleged sixteenth century witch, Mary Bateman, strips of whose skin were tanned into leather and sold to bind books – specifically The Hurt of Sedition and Arcadian Princess – following her execution, this section of the book is perhaps the darkest and most troubling, yet it is also the funniest, full of rangy wit, slant asides, knowing winks, and Lock’s characteristic word-play. Lock uses language to undo it, to return its hex three-fold to sender. Hyena! wants a grammar of irrational possibility, to carve a space in and through poetry for a feral commons.

Poetry essays by Fran Lock
////// 202 pages
Size: 14 x 21 CM

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.