Girl at the End of the World
9/17/2024
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
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 Body Braille
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
The world burns down and rises up from the ashes again and again, whether from wildfires, a father’s death, “clocks turning black, / or the dry riverbeds.” And still a girl remains, calling out into the cold cosmos. She is a survivor. Against the advice of grown-ups, she opens a door in the woods and walks through it, entering a place of memory, fantasy, and dream: the realm of poetry. The poems of Erin Carlyle’s Girl at the End of the World aren’t afraid of the dark. They reclaim the magic and power of a time when the wolves in fairy tales lived in the girl’s home and around the corner. Carlyle’s sharp lines cut, and her stark vignettes will blow you back. Here is the voice of a daughter of so many of our American crises: violence, poverty, climate, opioids. Here is a poet willing to travel to the edge—to outer space, to the room behind the mirror, or to her own darkest memories—and then return to tell the tale.
—Becca Klaver, Author of Ready for the World