SEDUCTIVE, SINISTER, GLAMOROUS, HORRIFIC: this collection brings together the best poems inspired by the undead, from Goethe and Byron to Emily Dickinson and Ishmael Reed
A nest of vampires literal and metaphorical, this poetry collection ranges across centuries and languages to bring readers a bevy of dark delights.
The undead have long provided the perfect vessel for humanity's fears and desires—from spine-tingling chills to sinister sexiness, vampires are the ultimate representation of the most frightening and alluring parts of ourselves. They've inspired poems that tell stories, proffer warnings, and imagine life from inside the eternal night, by authors like J.W. Goethe, Lord Byron, Emily Dickinson, Charles Baudelaire, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Delmira Agustini, and Ishmael Reed, brought together with many more in this one-of-a-kind collection.
With an introduction by Claire Kohda, author of Woman, Eating.
Contents include:
• Chilling Tales: poems by Gottfried August Burger, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Robert Southey, Anne Bannerman, John Stagg, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Rafael Campo
• Dire Warnings: poems by Heinrich August Ossenfelder, John Keats, Henry Thomas Liddell, James Clerk Maxwell, Charles Baudelaire, Christina Rossetti, Madison Julius Cawein, Rudyard Kipling, Conrad Aiken, Edna St Vincent Millay, James Weldon Johnson
• The Vampire Within: poems by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Walter Pater, Delmira Agustini, William Butler Yeats, Ishmael Reed, Dorothy Barresi, John Yau
Claire Kohda's debut novel, Woman, Eating, was a book of the year in The New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar, Glamour, BBC and HuffPost, and is now being adapted for TV. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in the East Side Voices anthology, the Virago collection Furies, and Electric Lit; and she has reviewed for the Guardian, TLS, FT and NYT.
