Wax Poetic / Coop Radio, CFRO Vancouver Interview!
March 11, 2023 § Leave a comment
I was honoured to be interviewed by RC Weslowski and Kevin Spenst on Wax Poetic / Coop Radio this week, to discuss my third book of poetry, A thin fire runs through me (icehouse poetry / Goose Lane Editions, 2023).
A thin fire runs through me — first print copies! (icehouse press / Goose Lane Editions, 2023)
February 23, 2023 § 1 Comment
Print copies of A thin fire runs through me (icehouse press / Goose Lane Editions), my third collection of poetry, arrived today by Canada Post!
How is she become a desolation, a place for beasts to lie down in!
Each line a strip of skin torn from me.
In A thin fire runs through me, Kim Trainor interrogates what it means to exist, to navigate the quotidian amidst the constant drip-feed of political and ecological disasters.
A thin fire runs through me grapples with Trainor’s own personal circumstance while contemporaneously documenting the tenor of our times, suggesting that “We peer into other lives; we absorb words, headlines, violent events. We see and we don’t see. These scraps are unintegrated, unintegratable, yet we carry them.”
“Everything Flows”: Seed 11 Pacific Salmon, in Dark Mountain 21
May 4, 2022 § Leave a comment
I’ve admired the Dark Mountain project for years now. One of my seed poems, Seed 11, Pacific salmon (oxyrhincus) has just appeared in Dark Mountain 21 (Spring 2022):
Our twenty-first issue revolves around the theme of confluence. The image of watersmeet, of two streams merging into one, has long had sacred connotations, as shown by the votive offerings left at the point where rivers meet. This book goes beyond watery metaphor to explore confluence in its complexity: both life-affirming and death-bringing, nourishing and troubling, creative and destructive. Increasingly, the times we live in feel like a confluence of catastrophes: climate, ecological, political, cultural and existential. ‘Collapse’, as poet Sophie Strand notes, ‘is when things that shouldn’t be connected merge.’ The climate disaster unfolding around us is itself a convergence between the breakdown of ancient organic matter and modern industrial ambition, technology, greed and carelessness, a calamitous meeting of worlds.
This is a joint collaboration between Dark Mountain and saltfront.
Poets in this issue: Jeffery Beam, Sharon Black, Adam Gianforcaro, Finn Haunch, Joel Long, Michael McLane, Paul Rankin, Kim Trainor, Jonathan Travelstead, Christopher Watson
Editors: Nick Hunt, Anthea Lawson, Eric Robertson. Poetry: Michael McLane. Art: Ava Osbiston. Production: Nick Hunt.
Cover: ‘Meander’ by Cecily Eno
Dark Mountain: Issue 21 is a hardback book, 264 pages long, printed on FSC-certified paper
ISBN 978-1-8384160-2-7
Seeds of Change: DCFA Climate Emergency Speaker Series #2
November 18, 2021 § Leave a comment
Please join us for a night of poetry centered around the theme of conservation, sustainability and awareness of the emerging climate crisis. We are pleased to welcome two local poets, Kim Trainor and Renee Saklikar. REGISTER: tiny.cc/ccpoetry
Kim Trainor is the granddaughter of an Irish banjo player and a Polish faller who worked in logging camps around Port Alberni in the 1930s. Her book, Ledi was a finalist for the 2019 Raymond Souster Award. She teaches at Douglas College and lives in Vancouver, ancestral, unceded homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ Nations.
Renée Sarojini Saklikar is a poet and lawyer who lives in Vancouver on the unceded traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples. She is the author of four books, including the ground-breaking poetry book, children of air india, about the bombing of Air India Flight 182 which won the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Prize and is the co-author, with Dr. Mark Winston, of the poetry and essay collection, Listening to the Bees, winner of the 2019 Gold Medal Independent Publishers Book Award, Environment/Ecology. She is currently working on Book 2 of the THOT J BAP series, an epic fantasy in verse about climate change, climate justice and global inequality. The first book of the series is Bramah and The Beggar Boy about a time travelling female locksmith helping seed savers, resisters, and orphans against the rule of the evil Consortium. Find out more at https://thotjbap.com/Time
Nov 24, 2021 07:00 PM in Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Excerpt from “Seeds” published in Ecozone
October 28, 2021 § Leave a comment
An excerpt from “Seeds” was published today in Ecozon@, Vol.12, No.2, 2021; “Eco-Georgic: From Antiquity to the Anthropocene. Seed 8. ELYSIACHLOROTICA(CHLOROPLAST,ENDOSYMBIONT) and Seed 19. GAIA (BIOSPHERE, THE CARNAL FIELD).:
The light reactions, the dark reactions, leaf unfurling, the light—
eastern emerald Elysia, clade Sacoglossa, Elysia chlorotica
littoral, in the salt marshes, the tidal marshes, small pools and shallow creeks,/
leaf unfurling, the light—the pigment chlorophyll absorbs the blues
the reds, the spectral blues, absorb a photon, lose electron flows
to pheophytin to a quinone, flow electrons flow the light reactions…
First performance of Ledi for the Assembly exhibit, New Media Gallery, New Westminster
October 23, 2021 § Leave a comment
First performance of Ledi (Book*hug 2018) as response to Assembly exhibit, New Media Gallery, New Westminster. Here, we are inside the Zimoun tower, a construct of cardboard boxes and cotton balls, drumming. Pt.1, “Wrenched from the cold earth,” was performed inside Zimoun. As Herodotus described the burial practices of the Scythians, we exited the grave/kurgan, circling the tower, and moved onward into the dark of the Tan archival exhibit. 
Rehearsal for Assembly response performance of Ledi at the New Media Gallery, New Westminster
October 6, 2021 § Leave a comment
Rehearsing for response performances at the New Media Gallery, New Westminster: response to “Assembly,” featuring the work of Elizabeth Price, Fiona Tan, and Zimoun. Working here on tech in the Tan installation.
“Ecopoetry”: Reading @ Poets Corner, May 2021
June 7, 2021 § Leave a comment
Sara H. has just posted my reading for Poets Corner, May 2021, “ecopoetry.” Thanks Sara for all your hard work !! 🙂 xoxo
A review of Francine Cunningham’s on/me
March 4, 2021 § Leave a comment
My review of Francine Cunningham’s on/me (Caitlin Press, 2020) is out now at Prism Online: “There is something charming and frank about this accessible approach, a little reminiscent of Sei Shonagon’s Notes from the Pillow, an eclectic collection of lists and anecdotes like a fragmented diary. And on/me does read very much like a young writer’s diary, preoccupied, as many first poetry collections are, with an exploration of identity (“Cree,” “Metis,” “white passing,” “PTSD,” “bipolar ii disorder”) entwined with memories of childhood and family anecdote. As you come to read through the collection, the title does indeed come into focus, the book a first edition of a manual or guidebook to Francine Cunningham. … a substantial number of poems, both light and heavy, show Cunningham at her best work, writing towards an understanding of who she is, within a complex history of mental illness, rape and PTSD, and the legacy of colonialism….”
kim trainor 