Girl at the End of the World (Paperback or Softback)

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.

Growing up in rural Kentucky and Alabama, Erin Carlyle's poetry often deals with the intersections of place, poverty, and girlhood. While poetry is her first love, she also enjoys film and music, and is an avid record collector. She teaches English and Georgia State University where she is also pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing. She lives in Atlanta, GA with her husband, two cats, and one dog.

Sara Moore Wagner is the author of three prize winning full length books of poetry, Lady Wing Shot, winner of the 2023 Blue Lynx Prize (2024), Swan Wife (Cider Press Review Editors Prize, 2022), and Hillbilly Madonna (Driftwood Press, 2022), and of two chapbooks, Tumbling After (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2022) and Hooked Through (2017). She is also a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award recipient, a 2021 National Poetry Series Finalist, and the recipient of a 2019 Sustainable Arts Foundation award. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals and anthologies including Gulf Coast, Smartish Pace, Waxwing, Beloit Poetry Journal, and North American Review, among others. In 2023, she became the Managing Poetry Editor of Driftwood Press.