International Gold Winner of the Readers’ Choice Book Awards (What Light Was), novelist Shawn Callaway Hays delivers Unsummoning, a sweeping mythopoetic epic. It is a lyrical reckoning with the collapse of gods, the erosion of forms, and the stubborn, radiant survival of Artistry in a fractured cosmos. Composed in seasonal arcs and braided with philosophical meditations, ancient citations, and a shifting metaphysical "I," this work calls out not for answers but for the unmaking of worn certainties—an invitation into the cosmic silence left when lyric, myth, and metaphysics begin to fade. At once an elegy for drowned divinities and a defiant ars poetica, Unsummoning traverses pagan waters, philosophical towers, and artistic ruins to trace the afterlife of meaning in an unsanctified age. Hays opens with the image of water—once a bearer of life, spirit, and divine resonance—now sunk beneath the synthetics of hubris and excess. From the dismantled trident of Poseidon to the suffocated cadences of forgotten oracles, this is a world where the gods are no longer worshipped but dismantled for spectacle, their music stilled beneath the weight of modern oblivion. Through a chorus of philosophical personae—Protagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and an itinerant Alexandrian-Hellenist—Hays unravels the unstable continuity of identity and voice. The soul here is protean, disaggregated across cultural ruins and personal memory, improvising selfhood in a world of simulacra, ideological husks, and broken mirrors. These poetic essays, shaped in the tradition of Whitman and Rilke, question whether we are fragments seeking wholes, or illusions grasping at permanence. Yet Unsummoning is no nihilistic descent. In its final books, Hays casts Artistry as the last aristocratic act of resistance—a peacock of fleeting glory strutting across a scorched garden, drinking blood from a sacramental basin at the foot of a mythic tree. With the rage of the Furies and the precision of a philosopher-poet, he offers a pagan’s creed of not in salvific culmination, but in aesthetic transmission, mythic return, and poetic fire. A poetic monument for a post-theistic age, Unsummoning sings with erudition, awe, and unrelenting clarity. Readers of Rainer Maria Rilke, T.S. Eliot, Percy Shelley, and Anne Carson will find in Hays a rare voice—at once elegiac and incendiary, classical and prophetic—unafraid to summon and then unsummon the very gods of our literary and spiritual inheritance.