romola grey plays the glistery xylophone, one foot perched up on a potato mountain. in her arteries are gold rushes, klondike blood and moody oxygen. there is a particular grace to her madness: she used to be a seaweed keeper in carmel, long-finned pilot whale watcher in cork, hoary hair weaver in aix, newspaper delivery boy in columbus—she planted soulful cacophonies of watermelon kids who ice skated around her ankles.

romola grey hits the notes in vernacular solicitude, her fingers in antarctican winds, sloughs off half of the continent of dry skin. she looks for a wolf-boy who will listen to her calls, and her musical outpour of thunderous howls. but there is a nome-alaska body in her gut, corpuscled deep in her legs that trench a frozen pumpkin patch—for she is her own snowy witch with the back of a lion.