[11/01/26] Carroll, Rosemary: The Possibility of an Island

Ugly Duckling Presse, chapbook

Publication Date: November 1, 2026

Publisher Marketing:

These poems move with the speed and perversity of the future—a fanged ritual americana crawling out of its grave. Carroll renders the horror and antsy hilarity of the present through a spiky desert mirage of decentralized composition. "It's a new day" echoes, oracular, through The Possibility of an Island, fractally distributing across characters, geographies, and epochs. By turns hallucinogenic and sterile, these poems refuse to let the reader settle, revealing the theater of violence as precondition, as rupture, and as promised end.

"Its subversive parable-like tone reminded me of Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery'. A deeply original nonlinear storyteller transgressing the bounds of language and our historical imagination to remap our relationship to the past and open up new dialogues in the present." —Jaclyn Gilbert

"Imagine Henry Darger's 'Vivian Girls' on horseback finding their voices and falling in love in an overstimulated and tricky world. What is really happening and what is just rattling inside their own skulls? The Possibility of an Island will swallow you inside this fever dream and spit you out again—a cowgirl reborn." —Carrie Ahern

"The Possibility Of an Island renders resistance and embodiment against the fragmented horrors of late-stage capitalism. Carroll invokes a litany of characters including cheer squads and horsegirls with gluey eyelashes, media witches, and a champion junior cowboy poet. A horoscope pops up to recommend a confrontation with the emptiness of our own making and urges, 'surrender to the crushing weight of your own insignificance.' This is a surreal and feral text for our dark times." —Cindy Rehm

"The women the girls the island the rage the property the panic the fire the horror the horoscope the horses. Recalling the cinematography and social critique of Marguerite Duras’s Destroy, She Said, this poetic, fictional, form-filled book is brilliance on every page. Prepare to laugh and have your heart broken." —Christina Vega-Westhoff