kim trainor

A review by Leah Bobet in Prism online of A blueprint for survival (Guernica Editions, 2024):

It’s at the end of one of climate poetry’s emerging tropes — that our inner landscapes and outer ecologies are one thing after all — that A blueprint for survival rolls up its sleeves.

The fourth poetry collection from Ralph Gustafson Prize-winner and Raymond Souster Award finalist Kim Trainor delves, meditative and magnificent, into the practical implications of all our yearning connectedness. If we need better relations with ecology and each other to make it through wildfires and hurricanes, what do they look and sound like? When we have to move differently in the world, how do we figure out how?

What follows is an intimate, interdisciplinary attempt to blueprint better relations — with space, trees, organisms, and each other — in a literally burning world. Over two long poetic sequences, Wildfire and the more experimental, mixed-media Seeds,Trainor braids together a beginning vocabulary for meeting climate emergency on equal terms. Her components are all enough material for a collection themselves: a long-distance relationship, fire summers, the self-concepts of invertebrates and Sitka spruce, a heap of scholarly references, local activism, and language learning. The result is a simple, subtle, thoughtful, and relievingly humble poetry collection. Working with material that’s frequently treated as epiphanic , Trainor thankfully keeps her material grounded, earthed, real. And in the end, produces something surpassingly beautiful: poems that record a struggle toward better ways of loving, and quietly argue that that struggle’s both winnable and worthwhile.