AN ANGEL IS A KIND OF GHOST (paperback)

Amy Jannotti (she/her), Bullshit Lit + Olney Magazine’s Hot Poet of May 2023, is a pile of dust in a trenchcoat living & writing in Philadelphia, where she received her BFA in Creative Writing from the University of the Arts. Her work has appeared in Non.Plus Lit, Hecate, Fever Dream Magazine, & elsewhere. She tweets @cursetheground.

"Amy Jannotti’s ‘An Angel is a Kind of Ghost’ is a long stare into the bathroom mirror from the perspective of the mirror. The poems alternate form to explore the body as it is dissected, the fashion & photography industries as they are made reality, and the scrutinizing gaze of men, God, and hell itself. She does all of this with winged-eyeliner precision & language as delicate & phantasmagoric as gossamer: it isn’t a self-portrait in the strictest sense, more a manifestation / an id with legs / a spell of long exposure. Let these poems cast their entrancing spell on you."

— Kailey Tedesco, author of “She Used to be on a Milk Carton,” “Lizzie, Speak,” and “FOREVERHAUS”

"With an impressive range of forms and styles, and artful dexterity in language, Amy Jannotti draws back the curtain on isolation and suffering in poems that ask, above all: 'see me and witness I am here.' Yet despite its familiarity with sorrow, its deeply honest confrontation with loneliness and lost connection, ‘An Angel is a Kind of Ghost’ abounds with humanity. It does not offer saccharine comfort, but exhorts readers instead to 'love unhopefully & in all directions like a spinning/planet,' a truer comfort in the face of grief, and a testament to human love.”

— Lilia Marie Ellis, author of “Love” and “Endless Love” 

"What if disappearing was an act of return? What if we lived our whole lives unwitnessed? Amy Jannotti’s ‘An Angel is a Kind of Ghost’ places readers in the strange betweens, the thresholds in which we always linger. We follow a speaker haunted by legacy in a world where 'the body is a practice of transformative dress.' As the universe unpeels around us, we watch paper swans and miracles be made and unmade, too. Through a series of stunning line breaks and images, Jannotti’s work demonstrates what poetry can do if only you look at it from an otherworldly perspective. She shows us how, in the end, all we can do is see one another, wholly, and remarkably so." 

— Samantha Fain, author of “Coughing Up Planets” and “sad horse music”