Poetry
A blueprint for survival, my fourth collection, appeared with Guernica Editions in Spring 2024. This book includes a long sequence called “Seeds,” which considers human artifacts and biological organisms that offer models for resilience and adaptation in the face of climate change and the sixth mass extinction.
“In A blueprint for survival, Kim Trainor gives us heartbreak rendered through a poetry that blends innovative form with delicate detailed precision: personal memory, science, and the art of seeing the world slant, meshed with an examination of our climate emergency. Each poem expands our sense of what the personal and the political can accomplish on the page.” Renée Sarojini Saklikar, author of Bramah’s Quest, an epic fantasy in verse
“Kim Trainor loves the planet and stimulates readers to do likewise. I’ve often asked myself: In this scary-as-hell, apathetic time on Earth, what do I want to be reading? This book has proved to be the answer.” Christine Lowther, Former Poet-Laureate of Tofino and editor of Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees.
“…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.” Leah Bobet, “Sculpt raw materials that can receive the light”: A Review of Kim Trainor’s A blueprint for survivalreview” in Prism Online, February 26, 2025
“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.” —A review in the Toronto Star, 4 April 2024 by Wanda Praamsma
“There is a thickness to her lyric, writing undergrowth and foliage, of trees and scientific names. A few pages further into the first section, as the poem “Paper Birch” begins: “These are notes for a poem I meant to write in August, but poetry / seemed very far away then. The BC wildfires smudged the shoreline / of the Saskatchewan—everything ash on the tongue, like cigarettes / or coffee dregs, and the sun a smoked pink disc. / I had not seen you for weeks except by Skype (I’ll strip for you, / you said, and you did) but now in flesh meandering, / now talk, now silence, now climate change and / your research on the Boreal.” There is something of the long poem combined with both the poetic diary and book-length essay that Trainor offers in this collection, articulating crisis and climate but expanding into an agency of archival research and illustrations; she writes asides and footnotes and prose stretches through a lyric framework in an impressive book-length package. This is a highly ambitious and heartfelt collection, one that even provides echoes of the detailed lyric researches of one such as Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris, attending to the big idea through an accumulation of minute details. The scale of this volume is incredible. I don’t know how to begin.” — A review by rob mclennan
A thin fire runs through me (formerly Bluegrass), my third collection, appeared with Icehouse Poetry (Goose Lane Editions) on 28 March 2023. Poems from this work, based on readings of hexagrams of the I Ching, have appeared in the Literary Review of Canada, CV2, and Qwerty, and six were longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize under the title “Sweetgum.” The title sequence won honourable mention in the Fiddlehead‘s 2017 Gustafson Prize.
Ledi, ( Book*hug, 2018) a book-length poem about an Iron-Age horsewoman whose grave was discovered in the Siberian steppes, was shortlisted for the 2019 Raymond Souster award. Here’s the jury’s citation: “Trainor’s poetry offers the reader a moving, powerful meditation on mourning as a burial of the dead and “preparing for life after death.” The flowers and grasses found at a burial site of the Iron Age Pazyryk woman known as Ledi, or “the Lady,” inspire memories of the narrator’s dead lover, a man with whom she travelled the American desert and who named and identified all the wildflowers that they found on their way. Through her poems, Trainor weaves these two lives and deaths through the flora and fauna associated with burial practice, so that the past is folded into the present in a quietly stunning memorialization of loss, known and unknown.” –http://poets.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/PRESS-KIT-2019-Raymond-Souster-Award-Shortlist.pdf
My first collection, Karyotype, was published by Brick Books in 2015. It’s central long poem, “Nothing is Lost” won the Malahat Review’s long poem contest. Of this poem, the jury wrote, “[the poem] explores the aftermath of the Srebrenica genocide in 1995 in which thousands of Bosnian Muslims were massacred. Such profound cultural and personal loss is almost beyond language. Taking as inspiration the International Committee of the Red Cross Book of Belongings, a publication of photographs and personal effects, the poet creates an alphabet of loss, weaving images of a glove, a marble, notebook, buttons – exquisitely particular personal items – with insights into the ways artifacts themselves become saturated with human sentience. Carefully ordered into 26 sections, the work is sharp and contained in its craft, yet its notes resonate across time and distance. The elegiac power of the poem carries scraps of cloth, rain, muddy fields, and wildflowers along with the immeasurable weight of horror and silence…. Kim Trainor’s ‘Nothing is Lost’ is a world-reaching lament for debris in all its forms, and for memory itself, inviting us to enter into the world-shattering impact of massive slaughter. In the tradition of Akhmatova or Celan, she writes of a bloody gash in the world’s flesh larger and deeper than most of us can imagine.” —Jury Citation, Malahat Review‘s Long Poem Prize, 2013
Here’s a list of my poems, interviews, and essays about poetry published in literary journals over the last few years:
Poems
“Seed 1: Shelter,” “Paper Birch,” and “North Road.” Anthologized in Fire Season II. Summer 2022.
“Seed 18 (Ogam, the tree alphabet).” Worth More Standing (tree anthology), Editor Christine Lowther. Caitlin Press, Spring 2022.
“Seed 11: Pacific Salmon (Oncorhynchus).” Dark Mountain, Issue 21 Spring 2022.
“Trickster, Scavenger, Discoverer of Light.” Seed 12, Common Raven; Seed 13, Silene Steonphylla, Svalbard Seedvault; Seed 14: XR/Getting Deeper.” The Journal of Wild Culture. Spring 2022.
“An Excerpt from “Seeds”: “Seed 8, Elysia chlorotica” and “Seed 19, Gaia”. Ecozon@. Vol. 12, No.2. Eco-Georgic: From Antiquity to Anthropocene. 28th October 2021.
“Seed 18: Lentil.” The Journal of Wild Culture. June 2021.
“Desolation.” Deep Wild Journal: Writing From the Backcountry. (US). Issue 3. June 2021.
Excerpt from “Seeds:” “Seed 5. Tiny house, caracol, snail + Seed 19. SARS-CoV-2.” Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities. (Turkey). Volume 1, Issue 2. Winter 2020.
“Pacific Tree Frog” and “Tonquin.” Fall/Winter 2020. The Cold Mountain Review. (US). Special Issue on the Undiscovered.
“Snowdrop (Galanthus nivalis).” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. (US). 24 November 2020. https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isaa135
“Say Nuth Khaw Yum.” Ecological Citizen. October 2020. Vol.4, No.1, 2020.
“Iridium.” Women & Environments International Magazine. (Canada).102/103.
“Poet’s Statement + Excerpt from ‘Seeds’: ‘Yellow glacier lily (Erythronium grandiflorum,)’ ‘Siit, tuuxupt, Sitka spruce,’ and ‘Hymenoptera (honeybee, bumblebee, Vespa orientalis).'” Anthropocenes: Human, Inhuman, Posthuman. (UK). 1(1): https://www.anthropocenes.net/articles/10.16997/ahip.27/
“Wildfire” and “Little Mountain.” Anthologized in a new artist book on wildfires, Fire Season. Fall 2020. Available now!
“Shelter.” From ‘Seeds.’ Dark Matter: Women Witnessing. (US). Issue 11, October 2020. Nominated for the 2021 Pushcart Prize.
“Editorial: Buried Seeds in Burning Times. Lise Weil, Kristin Flyntz, Jane Caputi, Andrea Mathieson, Anne Bergeron, JuPong Lin, Kim Trainor, Shante’ Sojourn Zenith” Dark Matter: Women Witnessing. Issue 11, October 2020.
“Blackmud” and “Tardigrade.” Issue 58, Southern Winter 2020. Otoliths: A Magazine of E-Things. (Australia).
“Blackmud.” Art song. Composer, Yi-Ning Lo. Created for Art Song 2020.
“ᚁ, k’i, betula.” 1 May 2020. Issue 57. Southern Autumn. Otoliths: A Magazine of Many E-Things. (Australia).
“Whitemud.” Spring 2020. The Dalhousie Review.
“Boreal” and “The Beautiful Cell.” April 2020. CV2.
“Paper Birch.” Winner of the Ralph Gustafson prize, the Fiddlehead’s 28th annual poetry contest. Spring 2019. Jury citation by Phil Hall: “This is an epistolary & braided poem that catches recent crises, scientific language, internet calls, & metaphor—all in its confident weave. Here is a passionate poem about interconnectedness & precariousness—skin & paper & bark as one.” The Fiddlehead, Spring issue 279.
Excerpt from Ledi, League of Canadian Poets, Poetry Pause. 1 June 2019.
“Room B” and “Wallflower.” 2019. CV2. Volume 41.4
“Ora.” The Antigonish Review. 2018, Issue 195. Winner of the 2018 Great Blue Heron Poetry Contest.
“60.” From Bluegrass: ghazals. Literary Review of Canada. 2018.
“Wildfire” and “North Road.” Arc Poetry Magazine. Issue 86. Summer 2018.
“Little Mountain,” “Over wine and whiskey we watch the naan rise,” & “Lucie, we are always giving up poetry.” The Antigonish Review. Issue 194. 2018.
“The Fox” and “Manna.” The Malahat Review. Spring 2018. Issue 202.
“from Bluegrass Ghazals: 57, 27, 31.” Qwerty. 36. 2018.
“Ghazals (30, 49, 52, 9, 32).” CV2. January 2018.
“Bluegrass.” The Fiddlehead. Spring 2017. Honourable Mention, 26th Annual Contest.
“Winter ghazals” and “Peredelkino 1956-1960.” The Antigonish Review. 188. Winter 2017.
“You tell me in the summer the light” and “The geometry of conscience.” The Fiddlehead. No.270 Winter 2017.
“glass, clay, Lascaux” and “Notes on the Atacama humanoid.” Grain. 43.3. Spring 2016.
“Field Notes: Arras 1917.” The Antigonish Review. Issue 181. Spring 2015.
“Twentieth Century Genre” and “The semantic fields of glass and other transparent materials in the poetry of Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński.” 37.2. Fall 2014. CV2.
“Nothing is Lost” (excerpt). The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2014. Tightrope Books.
“Two Days in Spring” and “Bicycle Arpeggios.” Montreal International Poetry Prize Longlist e-Anthology and in Global Poetry Anthology 2013, Signal Editions.
“Nothing is Lost.” The Malahat Review. 183. Summer 2013.
“‘Not Gorgythion, struck by an arrow.'” The Dalhousie Review. 92.3. Autumn 2013.
“That which is woven.” Grain. 40.3. Spring 2013.
“Cradle Song: Six Variations.” The Fiddlehead. 255. Spring 2013.
“Karyotype VII & XIX.” Qwerty. 29. Spring 2013.
“Russian Notebook: Moscow 1918-1920.” The Antigonish Review. 172. Winter 2013.
“Poem from a burnt notebook.” Existere. 32.1. Fall/Winter 2012.
“Tokharian Love Song” and “The Beauty of Loulan.” The Antigonish Review. 170. Summer 2012.
“Russian Notebook: Voronezh 1935-1937,” “Ash,” and “‘In the long hours of darkness, Baghdad shakes to the constant low rumble of B-52s.’” Prairie Fire. 33.2. Summer 2012.
Selections from “In winter the early mornings”. (“They must have been in place by that winter”, “The Voice of America relay station at Udon Thani,” “New Year’s Eve 2002. A recurring sensation of being alone”). Contemporary Verse 2. 34.4. Spring 2012.
“On the ordering of chaotic bodies of poetry,” “How to make a human karyotype,” “Oxyrinchus,” “Karyotype IV, V, VI, XI, XIII, XIV, & XXIII”, with Introductory Note. Grain. 38.4. Summer 2011.
“In this Element” and “Poem for Finn.” The Fiddlehead. 247. Spring 2011.
“Karyotype XVI – XVIII.” Event. 40.1. Spring/Summer 2011.
“Karyotype I – III”. Contemporary Verse 2. 33.4. Spring 2011.
“Guyasdoms D’Sonoqua” and “Vanquished”. The Dalhousie Review. 90.2. 2010.
“Vosnosensky’s Isopod,” “Clamshell Wind Chime,” “Malaspina Galleries”. The Antigonish Review. 41.162. Summer 2010.”Littoral.” The Fiddlehead. 243. Spring 2010.
Reviews + Essays on Poetry
“A small quiet voice in the dark: ecocide and lyric poetry.” periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. July 3, 2025.
“the Last Aubade: A Review of Catherine Owen’s ‘Designated Mounrer’ and
Riven.’ Prism online. September 2020.
“Poetry & Resilience: Lung, Muscle, Archive, Beautiful Cell.” Forthcoming, in The Town Crier, in a blog series on ecopoetics. 2020.
Sonnet Fever: A Review of Sonnet L’Abbé’s Sonnet’s Shakespeare. McLelland and Stewart, 2019. Arc Poetry Magazine 91.
Ten Trillion Neutrinos Flow Through Your Body Every Second: A Review of Matthew Tierney’s Midday at the Super-Kamiokande. Toronto, Ontario: Coach House Books, 2018. Arc Poetry Magazine.
“Tell How It Really Happened.” A Review of Douglas Walbourne-Gough’s Crow Gulch (icehouse poetry, 2019). Prism Online, 19 December 2019.
An Anthropocene Poetics: A Review of Adam Dickinson’s Anatomic (Coach House Books, 2018). Arc Poetry Magazine 90. October 2019.
Review of Jennifer Zilm, The Missing Field. League of Canadian Poets: Reviewing the Shortlist. 7 May 2019.
“Review of Dean Steadman’s Après Satie—For Two and Four Hands.” Arc Poetry Magazine, Winter 2018.
“Words Lodged in Muscle and Bone: Lee Maracle’s Talking to the Diaspora.” Arc Poetry Magazine, January 2017.
“Poetry in the Courtroom.” Review of Sue Goyette’s The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl. Arc Poetry Magazine 80. 2016.
Review of Jesse Patrick Ferguson’s Mr. Sapiens. Arc Poetry Magazine. Fall 2015.
“How Poems Work: Pat Lowther’s ‘Hotline to the Gulf.'” Arc Poetry Magazine. Issue 77. Summer 2015.
“Kim Trainor presents Pat Lowther.” Part of Brick Books 40 Year Anniversary “Celebration of Canadian Poetry.” 6 April 2015.
Awards + Grants
“Desolation.” Longlisted for the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize. November 2019.
Ledi (Book*hug, 2018). Shortlisted for the 2019 Raymond Souster award.
“Paper Birch.” Winner of the Fiddlehead’s 28th annual poetry contest. Spring 2019.
“Sweetgum (7 readings of the I Ching). Longlist. CBC Poetry Prize 2018.
“Ora.” Winner of the 2018 Great Blue Heron Poetry Contest. The Antigonish Review.
Canada Council for the Arts. Creative Writing Grant for Emerging Writers, 2016/17.
Banff Writing Studio, 2016
“Winter ghazals,” “Glass, clay, Lascaux,” & “You tell me in the summer the light.” Longlist, 2015 CBC Poetry Prize.
“Peredelkino 1956 – 1960.” Longlist, 2014 CBC Poetry Prize.
“Two Days in Spring” and “Bicycle Arpeggios.” Shortlist, Montreal International Poetry Prize 2013.
“In Baghdad it is night.” Longlist, 2013 CBC Poetry Prize.
“Nothing is Lost.” Co-Winner, 2013 Malahat Review Long Poem Prize.
“Nothing is Lost” and “When they come to that country swept with light.” Finalists, 2013 Malahat Review Long Poem Prize.
“Cradle Song: Six Variations.” Winner, 22nd Annual Ralph Gustafson Prize for Best Poem. 2013.
Canada Council for the Arts. Creative Writing Grant for Emerging Writers, 2013/14.
“Russian Notebook: Moscow 1918-1920.” Second Prize, The Antigonish Review‘s Great Blue Heron Poetry Contest 2012.
“On the gravity of light (ten exposures in the manner of Francesca Woodman).” Longlist, 2012 CBC Poetry Prize.
“The First Word.” Honorable Mention. Room Poetry Contest 2010.
“Littoral.” Honorable Mention. The Fiddlehead‘s 19th Annual Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize 2010.
Miscellaneous: Reviews + Interviews
Jan Conn, When “The Spring Light is Like Glass”: Kim Trainor’s Ledi. 8 January 2020. Arc Poetry Magazine, online.
Elee Kraljii Gardiner, “Seeking Peace: An Omnibus Review of Poetry by Wanda John-Kehewin, Arielle Twist, and Kim Trainor.” Prism international. 30 July 2019.
Archaeology of a Horsewoman. Review of Ledi by Jenna Butler. The Ormsby Review. 22 July 2019.
Reviewing the Shortlist: Ledi by Kim Trainor. Review by Jennifer Zilm, League of Canadian Poets. May 2019.
An Interview with Kim Trainor. By Rebecca Salazar. The Fiddlehead. 16 May 2019.
Poetry Mini Interviews: Very Short Interviews with Poets. Thomas Whyte. March/April 2019. Begin here.
Radio Interview on COOP Radio, Vancouver. First aired 18 October 2018.
The Lucky Seven Interview at Open Book. 5 November 2018.
The Excavation of Memory: In Conversation with Kim Trainor. Book*hug blog interview with Mary Ann Mathias, 10 October 2018.
Most Anticipated: Our Fall 2018 Poetry Preview. 49th Shelf.
“In Conversation with Kim Trainor.” Interview by Doyali Islam. CWILA: Canadian Women in the Literary Arts. 11 January 2017.
On Vigilance and Lyric Adequacy: Sara Cassidy in Conversation with Kim Trainor. Malahat Lite. March 2016.
Kim Trainor interview by Maureen Hynes. Toronto, February 9, 2016.
“10 or 20 (second series) questions with Kim Trainor.” rob mclennan’s blog. 26 November 2015.
“The Dirty Dozen Interview, with Kim Trainor.” 13 October 2015. Open Book Toronto.
Review of Karyotype by Deborah C. Bowen. Journal of Canadian Poetry– The Poetry Review: Volume Thirty-One For the Year 2015.
Review of Karyotype in Canadian Literature by Nicholas Bradley. “Supreme Fictions and Strange Relations.” 232. Spring 2017.pp.179-184.
Review of Karyotype: “Tenderly Urgent: Kim Trainor’s Karyotype.” Review by Barbara Myers, ARC Poetry Magazine. 9 October 2016.
Readings from Karyotype. audioBoom. Recorded in Toronto, 10 February 2016.
Blogpost on All Lit Up, 12 January 2016: “Beautiful Books: Kim Trainor’s Karyotype.”
Review of Karyotype: “Two poets not afraid to say the necessary things.” George Elliott Clarke. 8 November 2015 in Herald Arts & Life.
“Like a Coat or a Bicycle or a Lens: Stefan Krecsy in Conversation with Kim Trainor.” The Malahat Review. March 2013. (Long Poem Prize interview).
Memberships
kim trainor 
Impressive literary resume. Do you have a favorite magazine you have written for. I have also appeared in Existere it is a great literary journal.
I just wanted to say I like your resume format very professional.
Thanks so much! I like Existere too. I’m especially fond of The Fiddlehead–they published my first ever poem–but I love all the little magazines.
I first read your poetry in this past Spring’s Fiddlehead because I shared space in that issue with you. And now I see your name everywhere–the Malahat Award, longlisted for the CBC Prize this fall, etc. Anyhow, I looked you up because I was hoping to find a published collection from you. I hope to see that in the near future. Until then, I will continue to check the literary journals for your name. Your work has rekindled my interest in reading poetry. Thank you.
Thanks Jennifer — it’s so kind of you to say. I do have a manuscript, called “Karyotype,” which is with a publisher right now, but don’t know yet if it will be accepted. I enjoyed your story too in the Fiddlehead.
Kim. You dazzle.
Jennifer. I try.
I meant you help me get stuff done in a pragmatic, pro-active way. Much as SP did for TH.
well. you are my poetry wife