White Teeth, Red Blood Selected Vampiric Verses

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 (“The Dark Ladie”), John Stagg (“The Vampyre”), Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Rafael Campo
• DIRE WARNINGS: poems by Heinrich August Ossenfelder (“The Vampire”), John Keats, Henry Thomas Liddell (“The Vampire Bride”), James Clerk Maxwell, Charles Baudelaire, Christina Rossetti, Madison Julius Cawein, Rudyard Kipling, Conrad Aiken, Edna St Vincent Millay (“The Witch-Wife”), James Weldon Johnson
• THE VAMPIRE WITHIN: poems by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Emily Brontë (“Ah! Why, Because the Dazzling Sun”), Emily Dickinson (“A Death blow is a Life blow to Some [816]”), Walter Pater, Delmira Agustini, William Butler Yeats (“Oil and Blood”), Ishmael Reed (“I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra”), Dorothy Barresi (“Pocket Vampire”), John Yau