The Animal Instincts of Men

The vast majority of werewolf stories, especially those written for a modern-day audience, deal in metaphor. Monstrous transformations can be symbols for anything from coming out to coming of age to climate change, though they most often have to do with the divide between the inner “wild” self and the external, cultivated, “civilized” self. “Update on Werewolves” alludes to the idea the poet first presented in her 1986 poem “Werewolf Movies” that in men, the human self is a façade; it’s the inner animal that’s the true self. This is most apparent in the first two stanzas. The speaker describes a series of animalistic activities: “Those things frat boys do” (Line 6).

Many of these activities can be read as both monstrous and human. For example, the phrase “burst through their bluejean clothing” (Line 2) brings to mind the sudden growth that...