Steensen's sources are antiquarian archives, journals, magic acts: what has been saved and lost and saved again. [She moves] among materials of our checkered past--magicians, changelings, George Washington, seances, Cotton Mather, the Davenport Brothers, W. C. Williams, the spirit of Charles Olson. Through imaginative exorcism she brings back into our perception the experience of the invisible dead"--Susan Howe.