Jennifer Moss’s BEAST, TO BE YOUR FRIEND, a finalist in the 2008 New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM chapbook contest, is a strange beast indeed. Beautiful and odd in equal measure, these poems charm, are charms themselves collected on a string, shining, shrinking, shirking all of their duties, opting instead for play. Instead they make up a tiny bestiary (birds, goats, calves, cows, centaurs, octopi, zebras, dogs, and more) and court the darkness under everything.