Roadkill Sermon, by C. William Carroll

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Roadkill Sermon arranges itself as a broken liturgy across five movements—Invocation, Confessions, Absolution, Sermon, and Dedication—only to refuse every promise those forms traditionally offer. There is no grace here for the obedient, no comfort for the kneeling. Instead, the collection consecrates what organized reverence leaves out: bus stations at midnight, elderflowers blooming on cracked headstones, a drunk woman's smeared eyeliner, the grammar of a lover's skin learned and then forgotten. The speaker does not ask for pardon but walks through ruin dragging stars like a torn wedding veil, finding sanctuary in motion, in residue, in the names of the dead that live only in how certain evenings tilt.

This is a subversion of the prayer book for those who were never trying to be saved. The poems crack open geodes not for polish but for whatever light lives inside the rupture. They bless the sleepless who asked "why" when the answer was “because,” baptize themselves with thorns, and treat the page as an altar stripped of gods. Roadkill Sermon does not seek to repair or redeem—it carves moments of silent reflection into the skin, celebrates the flesh as final rebellion, and leaves the reader not with absolution but with a whisper from the ruins.

C. William Carroll is a poet from Scranton, Pennsylvania, whose work subverts traditional liturgical forms to make room for the irreverent, the questioning, and the uncontainable. Writing at the intersection of love and loss, Carroll treats memory not as ornament but as structure— building poems from fragments, residue, and what lingers after departure. His work moves through ruin and desire, refusing tidy belief or easy absolution, and instead finds the sacred in what institutions leave out: late nights, failed tenderness, and the stubborn insistence on joy as a quiet rebellion.