The Last of Their Kind

Maggie Wang’s, The Sun on the Tip of a Snail’s Shell takes its inspiration from the sixth mass extinction – an event encompassing destruction of colossal proportions and thoroughly entangled with what it means to be human. The poems touch the lives of a snail in a terrarium in Hawai’i, a bat in a tunnel in Sussex, and a turtle in a lake in Vietnam. At once deeply personal and historically and scientifically grounded, these are poems not just about the species we are losing but also about the world we have created and the ways in which it has, in turn, created us. They are poems of mourning coupled with celebration, of meditation coupled with urgency, of outrage at the havoc we have wreaked on our planet and of faith in all that remains.