In The Last Show on Earth, Yvonne Blomer gathers the diverse characters and distinct moments from everyday life, its tragedies, and triumphs, and begins to imagine them in a circus as side shows and exhibitions of the unusual. In her latest collection, Blomer borrows from museum dioramas, the paintings of Robert Bateman, and the animal portraits in National Geographic to question and explore the human element in the lives and survival of other species. In poems that are at times unflinchingly dark yet playful, Blomer balances on a tightrope of grief and hope as she traces the lines from motherhood and caring for aging parents to caring for our planet and its endangered creatures—the whale, the elephant, the wolf, the polar bear—as they face ongoing environmental destruction. The Last Show on Earth imagines us all as performers under the bright striped tent or packed on the circus train heading toward an unknown destination.

Yvonne Blomer is the author of four poetry collections, including The Last Show on Earth, which was published with Caitlin Press in 2022, and As if a Raven (Palimpsest Press, 2015); in the fall of 2022 Palimpsest Press released Book of Places: 10th Anniversary Edition. Yvonne is the editor of the anthologies Refugium: Poems for the Pacific and Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds (Caitlin Press, 2017 and 2021). Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur (Palimpsest Press, 2017) is her travel memoir exploring body, time, and travel. Yvonne is the past Poet Laureate of Victoria, BC, and the past Artistic Director of the weekly reading series Planet Earth Poetry; Yvonne is Arc Poetry Magazine’s current poet-in-residence for 2022-2023. She lives on the traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) people in Victoria, BC. www.yvonneblomer.com

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“Rilke famously suggested that we’re here to say ‘house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window—.’ Yvonne Blomer’s list is more organic: limpet, moose, willow, tortoise, mother, son, swan. The Last Show on Earth teems not only with names, but with beings: our desires and pains, the sounds of our breathing. In the midst of great destruction, Blomer’s poems remind us how vibrant our vulnerable world still is.”

—Rob Taylor, author of Strangers and The News

“Yvonne Blomer’s is a consummately tactile and embodied lyric, one in constant contact with the skin of children, the soil of the garden, the surfaces of water. Through loss and longing, these poems offer care for family and fellow creatures, moving through the insatiableness of life, of things run away from homeostasis, in recoil, spiral, tottering states of beauty for which there is no ‘normal,’ only love of all our errancies, all our failures. This book is a prayer offered against this being the last show on earth—a prayer for another show, for the gorgeous show of this earth to go on.”

—Stephen Collis, author of A History of the Theories of Rain

"Read against the backdrop of a global pandemic, the poems in Yvonne Blomer's latest collection, The Last Show on Earth, tap into the intimate nature of grief at the same time they speak to the collective nature of sorrow. The most ordinary of images—a boy standing in a field beneath a luminous moon—evokes a sudden inexplicable ache that resonates long after one has put the book down."

—Eve Joseph, award-winning author of Quarrels and In the Slender Margin