kim trainor

Blue thinks itself within me is a book that brings together my transformative experiences as an old growth activist at Fairy Creek with my emerging interest in the intersection of lyric poetry and ecology. The book charts my plan to write a long poem on oldgrowth specklebelly lichen, a species that is at risk, and in danger due to the clearcutting of old growth forests on Vancouver Island. This raised questions that preoccupied me as a poet, such as, How might lyric poetry function like a Miebach sculpture, incorporating ecological data into its form? How does poetry function, or avoid functioning, as trap to ‘capture’ the natural object, yet also approach the dark ‘thing in itself,’ with sympathetic care? How might the ambiguities of poem as made thing offer an opening, spaces, as in clear cuts or scorched hollows, to think, to shelter, to approach, and to be approached? How might poetry contribute to a co-making of the world with more-than-human-species, a sympoesis, modeled on lichen as form?

I present here only a few of those books and zines I found most inspirational and profound as I pursued such questions. Each selection here has made me want to disappear into a forest with a notebook and pen and write…. Read the list here