Willa Carroll: Demolition Suite

Willa Carroll will read from her new chapbook, Demolition Suite, along with projections from her award-winning short film.

Willa Carroll is a writer and interdisciplinary artist. Her debut full-length poetry collection, Nerve Chorus, (The Word Works, 2018) was noted in The Common as a “meticulously choreographed treatment of life as art.” Carroll’s poems have appeared in AGNI, Poem-A-Day, Tin House, The Slowdown and elsewhere. She won Narrative Magazine’s Third Annual Poetry Contest and Tupelo Quarterly’s TQ7 Poetry Prize, judged by Brenda Hillman. Her chapbook, Demolition Suite, was a finalist for the Tomaž Šalamun Prize and selected for the Split Rock Press Chapbook Series (2023). Her poetry videos and multimedia collaborations have been featured in Interim Poetics, Narrative Outloud, and TriQuarterly. Awarded Best Poetry Film at the International Migration and Environment Film Festival, her work has screened at festivals in the US, Canada, UK, and Denmark. After earning degrees from Bennington and living in NYC for twenty-five years, she’s currently based in her hometown of Rochester, NY.  willacarroll.com

Demolition Suite spins a cautionary tale for the Anthropocene. This innovative sequence engages climate change, environmental degradation, and hazardous exposure with unexpected poetics. From contaminated sites to troubled bodies of water, forest fires to rewilding zones, these poems cover wide ground­­ as their fluid tones shift between grief, wit, intimacy, and beyond. With kinetic diction, these pages stage embodied responses to our imperiled planet. Out of crisis, Carroll forges strange radiance, envisioning ecological restoration.

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

This is a hybrid event held at Writers & Books, 740 University Ave. Rochester, NY and streamed via Zoom.

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