Girl at the End of the World

Girl at the End of the World works through death with a sharp focus on place and environmental disaster, expanding into the realms of science fiction and mythmaking. This book is Erin Carlyle’s second full-length poetry collection published by Driftwood Press.These beautifully crafted, image dense poems capture the landscape of the South and of poverty by highlighting the speaker’s girlhood in flashback as she recalls violence and mourns the death of her father caused by opioid addiction. The collection widens into ecopoetry in its exploration of ecological concerns like wildfires that threaten the self and the earth. Connecting both threads is the search for answers through an interrogation of familiar childhood stories and tales, the supernatural, and the universe. The speaker has an impulse towards 'magical thinking,' that allows her to unpack the juxtaposed existential and ecological themes. Girl at the End of the World asks the reader to consider where we are going and where we have been. It is about a world and a past that are dying. Ultimately, it is for readers who want to know how to survive the personal and global disasters that are continually occurring.