A Charm Against Eros is a great book. . . . Michael Yost has a maturity beyond his years because he is steeped in the great works of Western civilization.

–Joseph Pearce, author and public speaker

Join Michael Yost, Director of Admissions and Class of 2018 alumnus of Thomas More College, as he reads from and discusses his debut volume of verse, A Charm Against Eros (Wipf & Stock, 2026).

In A Charm Against Eros, Mr. Yost writes of beauty and desire, marriage and fatherhood, memory and death, with a poet’s ear for the music of language and a critic’s appetite for ideas. Bernini and Homer share these pages with maple trees, children’s voices, and the comedy of everyday life. Moving among classical forms, richly ornamented lyrics, and plainspoken meditations, Mr. Yost asks what it means to love a world whose beauties cannot last, and whether our desires might lead us beyond the things that first awaken them. The answers are neither simple renunciation nor easy consolation. As the title suggests, a charm may ward off an enchantment, but it may also cast one of its own.

Michael Yost is the author of A Charm Against Eros, his debut collection of poems published by Wipf and Stock. An alumnus of Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, he studied creative writing under James Matthew Wilson, Timothy Steele, and Dana Gioia as a Scanlan Fellow at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, earning his MFA in 2023. His writing has appeared in First Things, Modern Age, The University Bookman, Crisis Magazine, and Dappled Things. Mr. Yost is the co-founder, with James Matthew Wilson, of The Colosseum: A New Journal of Arts and Letters. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and children.