Screenrooms and Silver Bullets is a collection of fourteen poems by Rhys Owens.
The collection moves between compressed social observation, esoteric vocabulary, affective instruction, analog horror, weather phenomenology, and long-form recursive perception. Its shortest poems can discharge an argument in one or two lines; its longest sequence, “Ghosts Sections,” develops the screenroom as a chamber in which media, memory, embodiment, and perception overlay one another.
A central term is nerveLogic: the body’s capacity to register an event whose cognitive status remains uncertain. The screenroom poems stage this relation through doors, guardians, machines, confirmation figures, film grain, darkness, and repeated attempts to distinguish map, medium, body, and event.
Other poems include “Oppositorum of a Contemporary Nancy Drew,” “Ideological Harassment,” “High School Politics,” “Spirit is Nothing that Is,” “Ganesa,” “Ludicia,” “King Because,” “Cloud Storm,” and “Killing the Self-Conscious Dream.”
The editorial apparatus places the book in the Lunar Arm and describes affect literacy as a compositional practice rather than therapy or doctrine. That apparatus should remain distinguishable from Owens’s poems.