Monster Verse: Poems Human and Inhuman [Hardcover]

Monster Verse: Poems Human and Inhumanbrings 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 includesBeowulf’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 Verseis both a delightful carnival of literary horror and an entertainingly provocative investigation of what it means to be human.Introduction: Distorting Mirrors, Split Selves, and the Origin of Monsters

ALIENS AND HUMAN MONSTERS

NEIL GAIMAN The Day the Saucers Came
STEPHEN KING The Dark Man
CALEY O’DWYER My Parents Were Monsters
ELIZABETH BISHOP The Man-Moth
NIN ANDREWS The Invisible Girl
RICK BURSKY The Man with a Hole in His Head
TONY BARNSTONE Nightmare Kiss
WILLIAM BAER Monster
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Strange Bedfellows: Caliban and Trinculo (From The Tempest)
DENNIS COOPER Ugly Man
ANTHONY MADRID The Milk One
ALICE NOTLEY From The Descent of Alette
AUGUST KLEINZAHLER Monsters
CHRIS DAVIDSON My Son Throws Sticks in the River
PATRICIA SMITH Bride
EDWARD FIELD The Bride of Frankenstein
JEANNE MARIE BEAUMONT Bride
SUZANNE LUMMIS To His Shy Mistress (Blc2