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.
