Frankenstein 's Children explores Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a lens into contemporary loneliness and hunger, fantasies of reanimation and artificial thought born of a dread that would deny or master the necessities that define us, join us, tear us apart. Having lost her own child, Shelley gives voice to a powerful illusion, a creature half-invented, half-found, raised from the dead and yet, by life, abandoned. These poems would bring her parable into conversation with movies and commercials that make of the dead a reciprocal companion. They would interrogate the creature as the dream he is, still, and the one he is not, full of real rage and confusion and the immaterial mystery of choice, that contradiction in his nature that makes him--and us--free to wander and console.