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"A book-length sequence of poems, Matthew Thorburn's String tells the story of a teenage boy's experiences in a time of war and its aftermath. He loses his family and friends, his home and the life he knew, but survives to tell his story. Written in the boy's fractured, echoing voice-in lines that are frequently enjambed and use almost no punctuation-String embodies his trauma and confusion in a poetic sequence that is part lullaby, part nightmare, but always a music that is uniquely his. The string of the narrative loops forward and backward; it's tangled and knotted. At first the boy believes that if he holds tight to this string and keeps following it, he can reach its other end and find a sense of peace. Ultimately, though, he realizes the string is endless. It keeps circling back. But what else is left to hold onto? How else can he remember what life was like before the war, remember the loved ones he lost, make sense of how he alone survived? And so he keeps telling and retelling his story, shaping his experiences into "sentences re- // worked until / they break / the hurt they / make a song.""--