Nerve Chorus

About Willa Carroll

Willa Carroll’s poems have appeared in AGNI, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, Tin House, and elsewhere. She was the winner of Narrative’s Third Annual Poetry Contest and Tupelo Quarterly’s TQ7 Poetry Prize. A former experimental dancer and actor, she’s collaborated with performers, multimedia artists, and her filmmaker husband on text-based projects. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and lives in New York City.

Praise for Nerve Chorus

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, author of Life on Mars and Wade in the Water

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, author of Our Andromeda and So Much Synth

As we speak or sing, the tongue dances in a hot wet auditorium momentarily lit. Half public, half private, this book maps the body in lingual movements that accrete and erupt out of stasis, striking choral resonances, transmuting personal/local histories, straddling the elegant and the repugnant. Here is a force to be reckoned with, a memorable debut.
—Timothy Liu, author of Polytheogamy and Don’t Go Back to Sleep