From light verse and straightforward sonnets to strange soliloquies and songs, Looking Up gives voice to the stony figures that adorn Washington National Cathedral-the beasts, fiends, and sentinels that watch us as we pass unknowingly beneath them.

Rooted in folklore and myth, medieval history, and the cathedral's restorative gardens and grounds, the 53 poems in this book awaken some of Washington's most enigmatic residents. Whether malevolent or benign, each creature offers its own solution to an old, beguiling riddle: "What do they want of us, those long-necked gargoyles who howl in the heights?"