The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Demolition Suite by Willa Carroll


This selection, chosen by guest editor Joey Gould, is from Demolition Suite by Willa Carroll (Split Rock Press 2023).

Score for the Body with Bioaccumulation

Save us from cold moons | lakes of liquid methane | sunless
planets | balls with no spin | no high noon | no big crimson |
behind clouds seeded with benzene | Give us our sun | hot queen
| radiation maven | sporting a burning corona | My father lived in
the desert | between a gypsum mine | & Superstition Mountain |
He storied the last wild condors | six foot wings | their blood
spiked with DDT | I know the taste | famous poison | lacing a
generation of mother’s milk | When he lost his way | under the
punishing sun | he sucked white sap from cacti | pulling spines
from his tongue


Willa Carroll is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, and writer. She’s the author of Nerve Chorus (2018) and Demolition Suite (2023), finalist for the Tomaž Šalamun Prize. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, Poem-A-Day, The Slowdown, Tin House, and elsewhere. She’s the recipient of awards from Narrative Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Tokyo International Cinema Awards, and the International Migration & Environmental Film Festival. Her multimedia collaborations have been featured in EcoTheo, Interim, TriQuarterly, and film festivals in six countries. Her cross-genre performance work has been presented at numerous New York venues. With an MFA from Bennington College, she lived in NYC for twenty-five years and is now based upstate.


Joey Gould, who served as Sundress Academy for the Arts Spring 2024 Writer in Residence, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent > Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review), along with transfinity (forthcoming from Lambhouse Books). Their recent work appears in SolsticeMemezine, and Defunkt Magazine’s Surreal Confessional Anthology. They write book reviews as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys, and have also placed reviews in Glass: A Journal of Poetry and the Sundress blog.

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