This selection, chosen by guest editor Joey Gould, is from Demolition Suite by Willa Carroll (Split Rock Press 2023).
Score for Rewilding Body
Invite the lichen | to colonize the rocks | dress up the deserts | tamp down the dust storms | Summon the moss | to hold the soil | microbe circus underfoot | Enlist fungi | to sop up oil | spilled in the brownfield lot | Big bad wolves | make your comeback | rewind trophic cascades | revive the wild | culling elk | Save shrubs for mice & bison | devoured by owls & mountain lions | Spare willow | for beavers in winter | governing rivers | Recruit otters | their pelts once called | soft gold
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 Solstice, Memezine, 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.