Atlanta poet Erin Carlyle's collection reckons with grief and her father's opioid addiction

Caption

Erin Carlyle is the author of the new poetry collection 'Girl at the End of the World'.

Credit: Peter Biello

Addiction can put stress on even the most stable relationship. Atlanta poet Erin Carlyle knows this firsthand. In her new collection, her father’s opioid addiction colors her memories of him. The book is called Girl at the End of the World, and she'll be reading from it at The Reading Attic in Marietta on Saturday, Oct. 26. Erin Carlyle spoke with GPB's Peter Biello.

Peter Biello: So this is your second book of poetry?

Erin Carlyle: Yes.

Peter Biello: And your first book dealt with similar themes.

Erin Carlyle: Yes.

Peter Biello: I'm wondering what you were trying to explore in this second volume that either you didn't get to or you weren't trying to get to in your first book?

Erin Carlyle: Yes. So my first book was a lot about my childhood growing up poor in the South. My family was greatly affected by the opioid crisis. My dad and mom, my uncles all were addicted. And so that really impacted my childhood, my girlhood. And so that's what most of the poems are about. There's some other things in there, too: girls I grew up with, things like that. With the second book, my dad actually passed away in 2019 of overdose — opioids and Xanax.

Peter Biello: I'm sorry for your loss.

Erin Carlyle: Thank you. He had heart disease. He had had a quadruple bypass about eight months before he passed away. And he was always in pain. So it was really legitimate pain that he had that he was trying to use the pills for. But, yeah, it ultimately took his life. And that's sort of what this book is about. So the same players, the same spaces, same places. But this is really about grief and just trying to come to terms with that.

Peter Biello: Yeah. I wanted to ask you about the father figure in this book because you never really want to fully assume the speaker in the poem is actually you.

Erin Carlyle: Right.

Peter Biello: You describe your first book as autobiographical.

Erin Carlyle: Similar, yeah.

Peter Biello: But I just wanted to measure the distance between who this person is speaking and in you.

Erin Carlyle: I'm not going to lie. You know, it's me, but maybe the poem version of me, my thoughts and feelings, not maybe everything I actually did and said, but also maybe a mixture of maybe other people I was seeing too — things that just kind of got messed up in that memory world. But it is me. Yeah. I'd say all of my speakers are me, mostly. I mean, unless I'm doing persona or something like that. But for the most part — especially in this book, you know — it's me.

Peter Biello: OK. And ... the father in this book — your father in this book — is described in a few different ways. I was hoping you could read one of your poems that — that puts him in a certain light. Can you read "Airspace" for us?

Erin Carlyle: Yes. (reads "Airspace")

Peter Biello: How did this poem come together?

Erin Carlyle: So I am working on my Ph.D. at Georgia State. I took a class and we were working on chapbooks — so, a shorter book of poetry. And I had written a bunch of stuff about my father, about my grief process beforehand. And I brought all of these poems in. And one of my fellow poets in the class sort of picked up on a few of the themes. There were a few times I'd mentioned this moment that he took us to the Atlanta airport when we were living in Phenix City. And this is pre-9/11, so you could just go and get on the shuttle. And we didn't have the money to fly anywhere, but he was so interested in flying. He had been in the Air Force. He just wanted to show us airplanes. And this was a moment after his first heart attack, after his first surgery, before I knew anything about pills or anything like that. And I just remember him being so excited. And to me back then, when I looked at him, I thought he was just like this older man. And this, like — just so silly and like, just my father. But now that I'm older, he was — I just think about how young he was and just how having that heart attack and just how he was at the very beginning of his addiction. Gosh, how that really detoured his life completely and what maybe what he could have been. You know?

Peter Biello: You approached these poems, I think, in a very writerly way. And what I mean by that is you're showing as many sides of your dad as you can. "Airspace" is a sweet poem, right?

Erin Carlyle: Right.

Peter Biello: Where you have this wonderful view of a very excited dad showing his kid something he's excited about. There are other sides of him, sides that maybe if he read those poems, I don't know if he'd feel too great about them. So he siphons gas in a few of them. He's rather insensitive in very particular ways in other poems. What was it like for you having to explore both of those sides as honestly as you can, even when it's clearly painful?

Erin Carlyle: It is painful. We didn't have the best relationship because of his addiction. And just the path that that laid out for him was something that I just couldn't be involved in, even though I totally empathize and understood the reasons why certain things were happening. ... And when he was younger, he made a lot of decisions, very rash decisions based on survival. We didn't have any money. He didn't have a lot of means to get money, especially after he'd had a heart attack. He physically couldn't do certain things. He had undiagnosed bipolar, undiagnosed ADHD until he was way older. And he just made a lot of decisions that made things harder in the long run. And that really kind of put a rift between he and I and my brothers and him. And so all of that was true, you know? All of those aspects of him were true. And I love him. But that was my — my experience of him. So it wouldn't have been a true book if I had just told the nice things, you know?

Hear GPB's Peter Biello and Orlando Montoya discuss Erin Carlyle's work on the most recent episode of Narrative Edge, GPB's podcast about books with Georgia connections.