Review of A blueprint for survival (Guernica Editions 2024) in the Toronto Star, 4 April 2024
April 4, 2024 § Leave a comment
Review by Wanda Praamsma, 4 April 2024: “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 blueprint for survival — arrived from the printer! Guernica 2024 :)
March 17, 2024 § Leave a comment
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
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