Scivias Choreomaniae is a danger to society. It exposes cadavers hidden from days to decades ago—from the rotten skulls of doctors to the rotted bones of prophets the medical staff held captive in their madhouses.

This is Lake Angela’s dance to the death, and you must enjoy it, and you must heed the holy madness. Georg Amsel, co-author of Ein Seidennetz/ A Silken Net of Stars and Lice with Lake Angela This is a book to satisfy those who seek poetry from outside our familiar culture with all its assumptions and wants.

Lake Angela brings a modern sensibility to her writing while drawing on the medieval way image and symbolism unite. Facing human issues common to all eras she has a ruthless mysticism and is unafraid to think in terms of the soul’s struggle to survive.

She is equally secure at the social fringe with its asylums and hospital wards, venturing to those for whom being understood is the first step to being healed. Scivias Choreomaniae is proof that the age of visions is still with us and helping us see beyond the obvious.

David Chorlton, author of Speech ScrollLake Angela’s Scivias Choreomaniae is a necessary, impressive collection chock-full of holy visions and sharp beauty, of “horses [who] drink from the pouring wounds of night,” “birds [who] cling to necks with stark feet and razor beaks,” and “flowers [who] gleam scalpels through their golden eyes. ” This gorgeous and generous sharpness carries the pain of miscarriages and violence felt as a person who experiences life as multiple.

Open the book and flip your world: see how decay is “a special kind of beauty;” the hawk, a savior; scorpion, a friend; serpent a creature of god, and the patients at the insane asylum where Lake stayed as a dance therapist—are prophets. At the asylum, you’ll learn how to fly like a bird and dance rain as you “spill from your bodies.

” Magic lives in this book. Scivias Choreomaniae is a world cracked open with possibilities.

Lake will convince you that cockroaches are mentors and in sleep we can “understand bird sign. ” Read these poems and you’ll be forced to step out from the world you think you know.

These poems are packed with the knowledge of multiple lifetimes. Sara Ries Dziekonski, author of Today’s Specials.