Monster Verse Poems Human and Inhuman |
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| Editor:
| Barnstone, Tony
Mitchell-Foust, Michelle |
| Series title: | Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Ser. |
| ISBN: | 978-0-375-71240-1 |
| Publication Date: | Sep 2015 |
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
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| Imprint: | Everyman's Library |
| Book Format: | Hardback |
| List Price: | USD $20.00 |
Book Description:
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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...
More Description 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.