Phantom Engineer

The poems collected here trace the development of Roach's signature "hellfire folk poetry" and deal with themes of symbolic hanging and immolation, suicide and rebirth, tragedy and loss, the dark history of Roach's native Memphis, Tennessee, and the even darker depths of his own mental illness. He sees this collection as "an exorcism," the expulsion of a certain evil in himself and the holding up of his end of a certain bargain.