Endlings: poems of extinction

Joanna Lilley's third poetry collection and fifth book, Endlings, was published by Turnstone Press in March 2020 just as the COVID-19 pandemic was declared. Endlings is Joanna's attempt to connect with and elegise just some of the species that no longer exist – often directly due to the actions of human beings. 

"We are so disconnected from nature we think it’s the economy that makes our lifestyles and lives possible. In fact it’s the complex web of nature within which we are inextricably linked and on which we are utterly dependent. When a species disappears, that complex web of life loses resilience and productivity. This book is a call to what we have lost within human memory. It’s a frightening reminder that Nature is our Mother and source of life.”

– David Suzuki

"Endlings moved and changed me. Joanna Lilley’s clear vision and assured craft affirm that it’s too late for the passenger pigeon, nearly for the northern white rhinoceros, but not for the living and not for art. ‘Perhaps we can augment / our aptitude for wonder,’ Lilley ventures. In honouring the lost, these poems invite and sometimes command us to attend and to mourn. To embrace their wonder is to commit to living differently."

– Stephanie Bolster, A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth

"Endlings offers an untold history from the voices of extinct and extant animals. Watch as a boy shoots the last Labrador duck out of hunger, and cringe. Be condemned by the dodo and the ivory-billed woodpecker; condemned for the things that have died without us even knowing. Joanna Lilley gives the mythology of lost creatures and shows how myth can blind. Careful of what is underfoot, she reminds, it may be an endling."

– Yvonne Blomer, As if a Raven