Magnolia Canopy Otherworld

"Magnolia Canopy Otherworld explores the places that hold the muddied and forested histories of women. Sensory and sensual, Erin Carlyle's poems portray an elemental girlhood, and the fragility and publicness of a body, even in the woods. These poems are full of dangerous baptisms, teeth and hooks, gothic flora and their attendant ghosts. Carlyle's style is lush and lovely, but always tugging with its dark undertow until we feel our own animal selves rise out at the end, gasping and human again."

-Traci Brimhall, author of our lady of the ruins

"Erin Carlyle's Magnolia Canopy Otherworld is a book of precise, gemlike images, where beneath the duende-soaked landscape of rivers, rabbits, trailers, and woodlots, the evidence of patriarchal damage lurks like an undertow. As an act of resistance, Carlyle sets before us the world we have been taught to ignore and says look: the roadkill, the small child wandering alone, the desolation of addiction, the woman-as-object. Wherever the poet casts her eye, the ghosts of violence, family, adolescence, and loss materialize and their visitations are traced with an urgent lyricism that is both gritty and graceful. Open these pages and watch as Erin Carlyle calls forward the drowned girls in their matching white dresses. Be ready for her to interrupt your life with poem after stunning poem in this haunting and arresting debut."

-F. Daniel Rzicznek, author of Settlers

"In this haunting and visceral collection, Carlyle guides us on an imaginative and transformative journey through Southern girlhood in which girls are ghosts, girls are animals, girls are daughters and lost friends, girls struggle to be more than just bodies. A riveting, smart, and unforgettable debut."

-Rebecca Morgan Frank, author of Little Murders Everywhere