These nimble poems grapple with what it means to belong to a body, a family, a country. With rigor and dark wit, Carroll conjures the exhilarating terror of moving through one’s life with nothing but “flesh holding / back disaster.”
––Tracy K. Smith
Here is a miraculous poet made of music. She writes what the world needs to hear—what I needed to hear. She takes on our greatest mysteries and inheritances: love, desire, loss, family, activism, art, justice— and every poem changes the air we breathe. This debut reworks the mind as it breaks the heart with its beauty. To be fully alive, in the face of devastation, grief, and longing, a poet must make a song that could be eternal. Willa Carroll is fearless in the face of that challenge. Her music deserves to be sung everywhere—in the church of our earth, in the peace between lovers, in the halls of our learning, in the quiet places of illness and death and mourning. Hers is an art of perpetuity, and she is a genius whose words I hold my breath to hear more clearly.
––Brenda Shaughnessy
FINALIST FOR THE GEORGIA POETRY PRIZE
SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION BESTSELLER
Poem from Nerve Chorus featured on The Slowdown podcast, hosted by the 22nd Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith.
The charged lyrics and sonic acrobatics of Carroll’s mesmerizing Demolition Suite grieve and celebrate, haunt and excite. How can anyone read these thrilling, sonorous poems and remain unmoved? Here, we are witness to the vast, capacious body. Carroll is a nimble poet who transforms us with the force of her wondrous and devastating lines. This riveting collection proves a vital addition to our conversation around urgent ecological concerns. Call these poems a warning. Call them a prophecy. Demolition Suite compels us to sing its fierce hymns.
––Albert Abonado, author of JAW
Intensely lyrical, emotionally expansive, and intellectually epigrammatic, Carroll tackles the science of the body, the body politic, and climate crisis with controlled abandon. This is a lexical call-to-arms like a “father’s hammer [that] | craters the walls” around you. Get ready to “Rattle the chain of custody” between her interior and exterior sensory realms. “I’m not your biddable animal,” she declares, placing her “ear to the wall | of your chest | for the flesh drum” to hear the orchestral scores for the millennium’s self-destruction. Rich, inventive, and wholly compelling, this “exit music” makes for a terrible beauty––I’m still savoring “all the sweet debris | every last bird” this powerful book has to offer.
––Elena Karina Byrne, If This Makes You Nervous
FINALIST FOR THE TOMAŽ ŠALAMUN PRIZE
SELECTED FOR THE SPLIT ROCK PRESS POETRY CHAPBOOK SERIES
Project Hazmatic: Score For Body As Cautionary Tale selected as Best Poetry Film.
Eco-ritual and apocalyptic pilgrimage, “Project Hazmatic: Score for Body as Cautionary Tale,” follows an array of wayfarers through endangered landscapes. Scored by an episodic poem and ambient sound collage, kinetic explorers don yellow hazmat suits as protective membranes and second skins.
Cloud Demolition featured by Poem-a-Day, curated by Brenda Shaughnessy
Published in Poem-a-Day on March 7, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
Winner of the 2022 Split Rock Press Chapbook Series Competition. Chapbook forthcoming in fall 2023.
Project Hazmatic: Score for Body as Cautionary Tale, Official Selection, Nature & Culture Film Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark