Nerve Chorus

Poetry. The ways we break and the ways we heal: this first book dives deep into family, society, and self to study the regenerating powers of the body and heart even in the face of tough work, bad luck, lost love, illness, and death. The radiance of life itself remains in these poems by a remarkable new poet. As the family copes with factory work and a father fights cancer, a daughter claims her body and her voice.

Says Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, "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.'"

Brenda Shaughnessy adds, "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."

And Timothy Liu praises Carroll's linguistic abilities: "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."