A Disgusting Lie

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.