How to Summon an Angel Version Notes
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1.0
The poems originally had nothing to do with each other; all they had in common was my mind at the time. In 2024 I arranged them into three parts which told a coherent story with running themes. I added transitions where none existed, set up parallels, parabolas, and preflections, and inlaid background mirrors that reflected my image in fish-eye distortion.
“Desiderata” was created out of rejected advertising copy I wrote for It Had Been a Long Exorcism. “Ascending Notes,” “The Dog Stops Barking,” and “The Philosopher-King” all doubled in length, and the last received several new twists. “Cookie Tin” was originally just the first strophe, before I packed it full of old writing that had been previously homeless. The final four poems in the book are almost entirely creations of 2024, as I sought to make the book (and my life) come together in a satisfying way. You can tell the difference through the increased freedom of my voice, the jostling density of whimsical jokes, and the teeming horde of wordplays and coinages. However, those new poems are written entirely in the perspective of myself in 2021, so they don’t contain even a hint of everything that has unfolded since then…
To make the closing strophe of “This Page Dreamed Its Letters,” I cannibalized in part a poem called “V” which I’ll post elsewhere on this website. Originally I planned to use it as the end of Angel, but I found I’d moved on too far from its poetic obscurities to the prose-like emotional directness and straightforward descriptive vividness that dominates my more recent work.
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