Poems Dead and Undead

In time for Halloween: a one-of-a-kind hardcover collection of poems from ancient times to the present about ghosts, zombies, and vampires. EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY POCKET POETS.

This selection of poems from across the ages brings to life a staggering array of zombies, ghosts, vampires, and devils. Our culture's current obsession with zombies and vampires is only the latest form of a fascination with crossing the boundary between the living and the dead that has haunted humans since we first began writing. The poetic evidence gathered here ranges from ancient Egyptian inscriptions and the Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh to the Greek bard Homer, and from Shakespeare and Milton and Keats to Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe. Here too are terrifying apparitions from a host of more recent poets, from T. S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath to Rita Dove and Billy Collins, from Allen Ginsberg and H. P. Lovecraft to Mick Jagger and Shel Silverstein. The result is a delightfully entertaining volume of spine-tingling poems for fans of horror and poetry both.

TONY BARNSTONE is the Albert Upton Professor of English Language and Literature at Whittier College. Author of numerous books of poetry, including Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki, winner of the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry, and The Golem of Los Angeles, which won the Benjamin Saltman Award in Poetry, he is also a distinguished translator of Chinese poetry and literary prose, and editor of the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poet anthology Chinese Erotic Poems.

MICHELLE MITCHELL-FOUST is the author of two poetry books and winner of the Elixir Press Poetry Prize, a Discovery/The Nation Award, the Columbia University Poetry Prize, a Writers @ Work Fellowship, the Missouri Arts Council Biennial Award, two University of Missouri-Columbia Creative Writing Fellowships, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work has appeared in The Nation, The Washington Post, Antioch Review, and The Colorado Review, among others.