Books
Joanna's books can be ordered in all the usual places online or from your local bookshop.
Joanna Lilley's fifth book and third poetry collection, Endlings, was published in 2020 by Turnstone Press and won the Fred Kerner Book Award. All about extinct animals, Endlings takes us across continents and through the long expanse of aeons to give voice to the dead. In poems that are lyrical, exact, and deeply melancholic, Joanna Lilley demands audience for the final moments of animal extinction. From the zebra-horse quagga and chiding dodo, to the giant woolly mammoth and delicate Xerces Blue Butterfly, the haunting, urgent words of these “endlings” cut to the bone to expose the brutality of Nature and the devastating repercussions of human ignorance and intent, while giving hope that our humanity will help save what remains.
The Birthday Books, a collection of short stories with a strong northern theme, was published by Hagios Press in their Strike Fire New Authors Series in 2015. (Hagios Press is now owned by Radiant Press.) Governor General's Award for Poetry winner Arleen Paré says: 'Joanna Lilley's stories shoot for the Pole; they are in love with the north. They do just what short stories must do: introduce people we want to know, places we can hardly imagine, all in language as precise, as rich as poetry, clear as deep northern lakes. Lilley writes with great heart. Each story has a spirit. Each story stretches its arms to the broad northern sky.'
Joanna's first poetry collection, The Fleece Era, was published by Brick Books in 2014 and nominated for the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry. It's described as a 'a wry and eloquent testament to the intricacies of our various relationships. From the shattered pieces of our environmental puzzles to the labyrinth of family dynamics, Lilley makes these dilemmas come alive. Chillingly sparse, attractively odd and refreshingly frank, The Fleece Era embraces the complexities of human life with an unsettling mix of the sardonic and the compassionate.'