Girl at the End of the World

"In Girl at the End of the World, her second, full-length collection published by Driftwood Press, one of Erin Carlyle's speakers (an admitted shoplifter) asks, What must it be like/to be an honest girl?" It's a provocative question appearing in a book that with precision and unflinching, clear-eyed honesty explores (among other things) the difficulties of global warming/wildfires, poverty, violence against women, and the loss of a beloved but complicated parent to addiction. Loss and hardship thread through these hard-hitting, spare and beautifully rendered poems, poems that again and again prove the power of language to transform suffering into art."

- Beth Gylys, author of After My Father: A Book of Odes

"It's hard/ to say if/ a crack/ in the sky/ can ever mend." In this captivating collection, Erin Carlyle confronts the specter of her own girlhood and relationship with her father and his death. Asking questions of origin, belief, memory, and absence, these formally dexterous and inventive poems explore how we see and understand ourselves, and what we may become, in the wake of trauma and loss. As the speaker confronts her domestic and ecological environments, she is a "little fish/ swimming/ back to the beginning." With an unflinching look at personal history and the "ruin" of the past, Girl at the End of the World develops a rich, compelling language to dramatize both grief and renewal. Ultimately, the speaker is a woman at the beginning of a new world, with the power to conjure her own future: "What grows after//all trees burn? What will be/ born here again?"

- Jennifer Moore, author of Easy Does It

"Erin Carlyle's second poetry collection is a temporal triumph, blending the past, present, and future into a heartbreaking and hallucinatory exploration of a girlhood burdened by poverty and the bonds of familial love. These poems bear witness to the ends of many worlds, both public and private: the last kiss of a murdered friend, a community sundered by the opioid crisis, a father's ailing heart, the post-apocalyptic earth. In quiet, luminous lyricism, these elegies teach us about the lonely beauty of survival and dare to ask: 'What grows after / all trees burn? What will be / born here again?'"

- Danielle Cadena Deulen, author of Desire Museum