kim trainor

Review by Wanda Praamsma, 4 April 2024: “The early poems in this collection from seasoned poet Kim Trainor lure you in with their lush journeys through natural landscapes, with love of the earth, climate despair, and sexual desire all converging on the page in beautiful prose poems. “Tell me. Where do we go from here?/Score me with desire lines — write words for songs that have none/in the wrist’s blue margins, sparse language of the tundra.” You want to stay there, luxuriating and feeling soothed, but, like the massive interruption humans have created on the planet, you can’t: the form of the book forks partway through, with more intensely scientific poems emerging, coupled with Trainor’s notebook entries, detailing COVID-19 news with cataclysmic (but not surprising) climate change updates. This book is indeed “A blueprint for survival” (the title pulling from an influential 1972 text in “The Ecologist”) and one we should all attempt to absorb.”

Tagged: A blueprint for survival, ecopoetry, guernica editions, poetry