Monster Verse: Poems Human and Inhuman

by Tony Barnstone (Editor), Michelle Mitchell-Foust (Editor)

Monster 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 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.

Genres: Poetry, Horror, Anthologies, Adult, Dragons, Nonfiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published September 15, 2015

About the author

Tony Barnstone is the Albert Upton Professor of English at Whittier College and has a Masters in English and Creative Writing and Ph.D. in English Literature from UC Berkeley. His books of poems include Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki (BKMK Press, 2009, winner of the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry), The Golem of Los Angeles (Red Hen Press, 2008, winner, Benjamin Saltman Award); Sad Jazz: Sonnets (Sheep Meadow Press, 2005); and Impure: Poems by Tony Barnstone (University Press of Florida, 1998), in addition to the chapbook Naked Magic (Main Street Rag). He is also a distinguished translator of Chinese poetry and literary prose and an editor of literary textbooks. His books in these areas include Chinese Erotic Poetry (Everyman, 2007); The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (Anchor, 2005); Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry (Wesleyan, 1993); Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Poems of Wang Wei (UP of New England, 1991); The Art of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese Masters (Shambhala, 1996); and the textbooks Literatures of Asia Africa and Latin America, Literatures of Asia, and Literatures of the Middle East (all from Prentice Hall Publishers). Among his awards are a fellowship from the NEA, a fellowship from the California Arts Council, a Pushcart Prize in Poetry, and 1st place in in the 2008 Strokestown International Poetry Prize.

He is the recipient of many national poetry prizes and of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. Born in Middletown, Connecticut, and raised in Bloomington, Indiana, Barnstone has lived in Greece, Spain, Kenya and China. His website is:
http://www.barnstone.com

Reviews

[Justin Tate · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a huge fan of weird/unusual/horror-esque poems and there are certainly some stellar entries in this anthology. That said, this collection wasn't as consistently good as previous releases in the Everyman series. I marked the poems which I thought were exceptional and only came up with 7. They were:

Neil Gaiman - The Day the Saucers Came (This one is particularly superb)
Edward Field - The Bride of Frankenstein
James Weldon Johnson - The White Witch
Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill - The Fairy Hitchhiker
Mariano Zaro - Sireno / Merboy
Krystal Valladares - Medusa (nice to see a very young poet in the collection - and one that writes in rhyme no less!)
Jennifer Clement - Scarecrow
Dr. Seuss - Mr. Grinch (Yes, "You're A Mean One Mr. Grinch" is included here and it's actually quite an enjoyable experience to read the iconic song on the printed page)

This isn't to say the other poems are bad, some were, most weren't, but I did have higher expectations than just 7 stand-outs. I also felt that the theme wasn't fully realized. It felt a bit like a "B-side Collection" of random leftovers from the other horror-themed anthologies.

OVERALL: Everyman has a great series spooky poetry collections, but I wouldn't start here. Try "Poems Bewitched and Haunted" or "Killer Verse" first.

[NinjaMuse · Rating 2 out of 5]

In brief: A collection of poetry about monsters, whether they’re human or mythological or outsiders or something else entirely.

Thoughts: I have much the same thoughts about this collection as I did about the last Pocket Poets book from these editors, Poems Dead and Undead. It’s fine, a nice mix of poems and styles, with maybe a few more this time that appeal to my taste in poetry, but it suffers from the same narrow focus. There are a lot of Western monsters, creatures out of classical mythology, and movie monsters, and a fair number of Western canon, classic lit type sources (Poe, Shakespeare, Beowulf, etc.), and not a lot of, for instance, monsters from minority cultures.

I was also disappointed by the inclusion of human monsters. Not because there aren’t monstrous humans—there’s a serial killer in the collection, after all—but because their definition of “monster” includes loners and disfigured people. I’d have liked to see more meditations on actually horrible people, or minority voices about oppression, instead of the kind of tame and questionable humans the editors included.

There’s also this thing the editors do which is neat in small doses, of putting poems on the same topic side by side for comparison. Two poems about vampires or mermaids? Great. Interesting. Five poems? Gets to be a little boring and makes me wonder why they felt including that many was important.

My last couple poetry reviews, I’ve cited poems from the collections I enjoyed. I don’t think there really are any this time? I mean, okay, it opens with “The Day the Saucers Came” by Neil Gaiman, which I’ve always liked, and I’ve already mentioned Shakespeare and Beowulf, but beyond that? There’s nothing particularly memorable.

Overall, this gets a solid “this was fine” and from now on, I’m going to check poetry editors because clearly, this duo makes me grumpy.

5/10

To bear in mind: Contains some poems about monstrous actions, including murder, sexual assault, cannibalism, and the deliberate spreading of HIV.

[Ryan Denson · Rating 5 out of 5]

"To be a monster is to be inhuman. Or to be a monster is to be all-too-human. Either way, in order to talk about monsters, one first must talk about what it means to be human."

With an extraordinarily vast range of subjects, encompassing werewolves, mermaids, Godzilla and even Mr. Grinch, and drawing snippets from a variety of authors from Neil Gaiman to the Beowulf poet and Homer, this minuscule compilation proves to be an entertaining literary sampling on the loosely threaded subject of monstrosity. While many of the big name monsters (the Sirens, Medusa, the Loch Ness Monster, etc.) receive their due, there is also a fair amount of more obscure types and original works from poets in the last century or so. Anthropomorphic and metaphorical types of monsters are also included through, which neatly relates to the editor's musing about monstrosity and the nature of (in)humanity in the introduction. Overall, a very interesting and enjoyable collection to read, perhaps the only drawback being the general lack of works from outside the Anglophone and European milieu.

[Kem White · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Monster Verse" is a very interesting collection of poetry. Most are not your typical poems. Several of them are from well-knows myths and legends, e.g., Beowulf, The Odyssey, and Jason & the Argonauts. There are excerpts from Shakespeare, Tolkien, and King Arthur.

While I enjoyed a lot of the selections, I didn't absolutely adore many of the poems. James Weldon Johnson's "The White Witch" was probably my favorite. It had great narrative, was quite descriptive, and was clearly written by a man who fears sensuous women. Great fun. "The Bride of Frankenstein" was also a winner as Edward Field crafted a scary Halloween poem ("The Baron decided to mate the monster,/to breed him perhaps,/in the interest of pure science, his only god.") Pierre de Ronsard's "Invective Against Denise, A Witch" has great imagery and is quite scary.

There we only a few I really didn't like. Thom Gunn's "Hitch-Hiker" reeks of pretentiousness and really doesn't make sense. Spenser's "The Quelling of the Blatant Beast" from The Faerie Queene was written more than 500 years ago and used too many obscure words. The selection from Robert Lowell's "The Mermaid" was a little too abstruse.

All in all there are a lot of fun poems in this anthology. Some are very gruesome, many are frightening, and most will make you wonder where the poet's head was at when they wrote the poem. Recommended.

[Hiram · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s always difficult to review poetry. I often feel that if I didn’t like an anthology, it was a difference in taste. And that another person would enjoy this more.
I liked this anthology. I like that the Pocket Poets series goes into topics that are not often represented in poetry. This is a far departure from the lovely romantic poems that are sweet to read. These often invoke “disgusting” imagery and unorthodox points of view. It’s wonderful.
It’s well organized, and the introduction is very good, and informative. I might even say moving as it describes what it is to be a monster.
It often brought pages from other books into this anthology. Passages from novels and longer stories. It could be a lack of material, but it still sometimes bothers me because it may read like poetry when its another type of literary work. I would like the grand majority of these anthologies to be poetry intended to be poetry.
Either way recommend it for a lover of poetry and monsters.

[John Majerle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This anthology contained several old favorites plus a variety on soon to be new favorites. Well worth reading.

[Ha Li · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of fun, dark, and entertaining poems about a variety of monster themes.

[Holland Bowles · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t normally read poetry but this was a good place for me to start. I enjoyed the topic and all the pieces taken from Homer and other mythology!

[Sandy · Rating 2 out of 5]

A strange combination of poems.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting collection of poems by various authors with the unifying theme of monsters - both human and inhuman. Poets range from Appolonius to Shakespeare to Neil Gaiman and beyond.