Monster Verse : Poems Human and Inhuman

Monster Verse: Poems Human and Inhuman brings to life a colorful menagerie of fantastical creatures from across the ages.

Humans have always defined themselves by imagining the inhuman; the gloriously gruesome monsters that enliven our literary legacy haunt us by reflecting our own darkest possibilities. The poems gathered here range in focus from extreme examples of human monstrousness—murderers, cannibals, despotic Byzantine empresses—to the creatures of myth and nightmare: dragons, sea serpents, mermaids, gorgons, sirens, witches, and all sorts of winged, fanged, and fire-breathing grotesques. The ghastly parade includes Beowulf’s Grendel, Homer’s Circe, William Morris’s Fafnir, Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock, Robert Lowell’s man-eating mermaid, Oriana Ivy’s Baba Yaga, Thom Gunn’s take on Jeffrey Dahmer, and Shakespeare’s hybrid creature Caliban, of whom Prospero famously concedes, “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”

Monster Verse is both a delightful carnival of literary horror and an entertainingly provocative investigation of what it means to be human.

TONY BARNSTONE is the Albert Upton Professor of English Language and Literature at Whittier College, California. Author of numerous books of poetry, includingTongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki, winner of the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry, he is also a distinguished translator of Chinese poetry and literary prose, and editor of the Everyman's Library Pocket Poet anthology Chinese Erotic Poems.

MICHELLE MITCHELL-FOUST is the author of two poetry books and winner of numerous awards including a Nation "Discovery" Award, the Columbia University Poetry Prize, the Missouri Arts Council Biennial Award, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work has appeared in The Nation, The Washington Post, Antioch Review, and The Colorado Review. She lives in Gold Beach, Oregon.