kim trainor

My new book arrived today from the printer — A blueprint for survival (Guernica Editions 2024). The cover features a blueprint of the Svalbard Seedbank, superimposed on a photograph of paper birch bark. The launch of my book is this Spring Equinox, Tuesday 19th March 20224, from 4 to 6pm at the Amelia Douglas Gallery at Douglas College, New Westminster. Floor North, Douglas College, 700 Royal Avenue, New Westminster; featuring poetry films by Kim Trainor with soundscapes by Hazel Fairbairn

A blueprint for survival begins in wildfire season, charting a long-distance relationship against the increasing urgency of climate change in the boreal, then shifts to a long sequence, “Seeds,” which thinks about forms of resistance, survival, and emergence in the context of the sixth mass extinction. Each seed functions as blueprint, whether simple human-made tool or complex organism driven by its DNA to adapt to and respond to our current existential threat, each showing a different way of being in the world: lentil, snowdrop, chinook salmon, codex, tardigrade, honeybee, “the beautiful cell.”

“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.”

                        –Renee Sarojini Saklikar, author of Bramah’s Quest

“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