Kevin Prufer's similes

The second poem in Kevin Prufer's latest book, National Anthem, blew me away. It opens like so:

We wanted to find America through the gasps of snow that fell like last century's angels--

That's evocative in its way, but the simile is specific while still being vague--how would last century's angels fall differently from this century's angels? It's a pretty line masquerading as an image but I can't really see the snow.

The texture of the poem gets richer from there, the metaphors evoking a kind of gorgeous but terrible dreamscape: "the moon atop its brilliant derrick, the poor burning so beautifully in the oilfields" ... "by dawn the light played its ringed fingers over the dashboard and said, Wake up, // fellow Americans, wake up and see what I have made for you" ... so by now I am beginning to be convinced by this speaker. Then Prufer echoes the structure of the first simile, and you realize that semi-weak gesture serves mostly to foreshadow and act as a foil against this one:

the snow grew thick and clotted on the windshield, sleet falling like frozen pilots,

their legs shattering in the crowded streets.

Holy shit! Now that's a simile. You apprehend its intense palpability all the more for the vagueness of the first version.

Similes so often seem needless to me, an impulse to "poem up" and describe. One that really adds meaning to a poem is rare.