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.