I’m so excited to share some content from my new book, Stars Around My Scars: The Annotated Poetry of Taylor Swift, out tomorrow (28 January)! If you haven’t yet ordered a copy, I’m hoping this will convince you to do so!
For each of the 46 songs included in the book (you can find my rationale and criteria for choosing songs in the introduction), you’ll find my annotations in purple, pointing out relevant literary techniques where they add to the meaning and significance of the song, as well as noteworthy Easter eggs and cross-references with Swift’s other works. I’ve done this in the style I would usually use to annotate poetry, and the style I try to teach my students. Some of my comments are rather spare due to space constraints, so you can use your own imagination to augment them as you wish! (This is particularly useful if you’d like to use the annotations as the basis of a lesson plan – you can ask students to develop the ideas further).
In addition, for each song you’ll also find a few paragraphs of analysis. I offer my interpretation of the meaning of the song, and why it’s important – both in the context of Swift’s discography, but also the context of (literary and popular) culture more generally. Here, I aim to connect form and content, and explain how Swift’s use of various literary techniques helps to elucidate the key messages of the song.
If you’re a teacher, you’ve got 46 readymade lesson plans right here! If you’re a casual fan, I hope this will offer you a deeper dive into Swift’s discography. If you’re a hardcore Swiftie, I hope you’ll find a few gems with which to embellish your existing knowledge, especially in the glossary, where I list all the literary techniques relevant to Swift’s work.
I’m so proud of this book, and grateful to the wonderful designers for bringing it to life in such a gorgeous way. Enjoy!
Swifterature 
I am working my way through your book and really enjoying it! Having just finished ‘Clean” I thought I would share a few thoughts on the intertextuality of “Clean” with respect to three Taylor songs- “Come in with the Rain,” “Forever and Always,” and “Picture to Burn”- and one outlier, “Pictures of You” by the Cure. What an interesting progression of the “rain in my bedroom” imagery, from the “Fearless” era yearning for fate to bring love to her (through her bedroom window), to the “Red” era sense of an all-encompassing betrayal and sadness that comes in the form of rain in her bedroom, to the “1989” era which finds her punching a hole in the roof to let the rain in so it can wash away her grief. The rain also carries away “all my pictures of you,” which seems a call back to the “Debut” era exorcism-by-fire of “Picture to Burn.” I can’t help but wonder if Taylor was also thinking about “Pictures of You”—an indie song that is “much cooler than yours” and released in 1989—in which Robert Smith sings “remembering you standing quite in the rain…we kissed as the sky fell in…if only I’d thought of the right words, I wouldn’t be breaking apart all my pictures of you.”