Screenrooms and Silver Bullets is a fourteen-poem collection by Rhys Owens, published in the Lunar Arm of New Human 2.
The editorial framing presents the poems as enactments of affect literacy: the capacity to metabolize experience through symbolic play without requiring belief, doctrine, or permanent identity capture.
The collection ranges from extreme compression to extended perceptual architecture. “Ideological Harassment” places its argument in two lines. “King Because” compresses consumption, iconoclasm, and bodily appetite. “Cloud Storm” builds a precise prestorm phenomenology. “Killing the Self-Conscious Dream,” dated 2013, uses repeated imperatives—going, standing, remembering—to create a temporal pressure the archive relates to the missing aorist.
The collection’s most developed structure is the Ghosts Sections suite:
1. Lock Door, Get Key 2. The Guardian Tries Veils 3. Machine 4. Confirmation Character
Together they construct the screenroom, a perceptual space where screens, parental instruction, social formation, analog-horror atmosphere, memory, and body response bleed into one another.
The neologism nerveLogic names the collection’s governing epistemology. The body registers and authenticates an event even when the reflective mind cannot establish whether the event is objectively present, remembered, mediated, simulated, or inherited.
The poems are cross-related to Shining Ignorance, Affective Keyboard Shortcuts, Shine & Cut, the Three Compressions, the Catullus Room, and the Sappho Room. These relations place Owens’s poetry inside the archive without reducing the poems to illustrations of those frameworks.