kim trainor

About

I’m a poet and instructor in the English Department at Douglas College. This blog is a series of posts I’ve written over the years on poetry and its relation to witness and making; lyric and DNA; opsis + melos; poets Philip Larkin to Pat Lowther; an Iron age horsewoman; Wyatt; miscellany. My most recent book is A blueprint for survival (Guernica Editions, 2024). It consists of a series of poems on wildfire, the boreal, the polar vortex, the Blackmud, the Whitemud, Desolation Peak, Widgeon, Say Nuth Khaw Yum; followed by a long sequence called “Seeds” that documents organisms and human artefacts offering resilience in the face of climate change. Some of these have been published in: Anthropocene (AHIP); ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment; Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities; Cold Mountain Review; and Otoliths magazine. I also have a piece on eco lyric poetry in periodicities, and a guest blog out on the subject of ecopoetics with The Town Crier, for The Puritan magazine. You can find some reviews of A blueprint for survival here, here, and here.

My next book is Blue thinks itself within me: Lyric poetry, ecology, and lichenous form, a monograph that interweaves ecopoetics and my experiences as a forest defender at Ada’itsx / Fairy Creek. It will appear with Oskana Poetry and Poetics / University of Regina Press in February 2026.

A thin fire runs through me (icehouse poetry) appeared in 2023. Ledi (Book*hug 2018) was a finalist for for the 2019 Raymond Souster award. I was longlisted for the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize for my poem “Desolation.” Reviews of Ledi can be found here and here. 🙂 I’ve also won the Malahat Review long poem prize (2013), the Antigonish Review’s Great Blue Heron prize (2018). You can also see an interview, about “Paper Birch,” which won The Fiddlehead’s 2019 Ralph Gustafson prize for best poem.