kim trainor

About

I’m a poet and instructor in the English Department at Douglas College. This blog is a series of posts I’ve written over the years on poetry and its relation to witness and making; lyric and DNA; opsis + melos; poets Philip Larkin to Pat Lowther; an Iron age horsewoman; Wyatt; miscellany. My most recent book, Ledi (Book*hug 2018) was a finalist for for the 2019 Raymond Souster award. I was longlisted for the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize for my poem “Desolation.” You can find some reviews of Ledi here and here. 🙂 You can also see my most recent interview, about “Paper Birch,” which won The Fiddlehead’s 2019 Ralph Gustafson prize for best poem.

My next book is A thin fire runs through me, a sequence of short poems offering readings of the I Ching, or Book of Changes. Excerpts from this manuscript have been published by Qwerty and longlisted under the title “Sweetgum (7 readings of the I Ching)” for the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize. It will appear with Icehouse Poetry (Goose Lane Editions) on 28 March 2023.

My current project, A blueprint for survival, will appear with Guernica Editions in Spring 2024. consists of a series of poems on wildfire, the boreal, the polar vortex, the Blackmud, the Whitemud, Desolation Peak, Widgeon, Say Nuth Khaw Yum; followed by a long sequence called “Seeds” that documents organisms and human artefacts offering resilience in the face of climate change. Some of these have been published recently or are forthcoming in: Anthropocene (AHIP); ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment; Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities; Cold Mountain Review; and Otoliths magazine. I also have a guest blog out on the subject of ecopoetics with The Town Crier, for The Puritan magazine.