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A Blueprint For Survival

A Blueprint For Survival

By Kim Trainor

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.”

Details

(Essential Poets)

9781771838627

118 pages |

$21.95 CAD
$21.95 CAD
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Reviews

Highly ambitious and heartfelt ... the scale of this volume is incredible. I don’t know how to begin.

rob mclennan's blog

The early poems in this collection 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 ... 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.

Wanda Praamsma, Toronto Star

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About the author

Kim Trainor is the granddaughter of an Irish banjo player and a Polish faller who worked in logging camps around Port Alberni in the 1930s. Her earlier books are Karyotype (Brick Books, 2015), Ledi (Book*hug, 2018), shortlisted for the Raymond Souster award, and A thin fire runs through me (icehouse poetry / Goose Lane Editions, 2023). Her poems have appeared in Anthropocenes (AHIP), Ecocene, ISLE, Ecozon@, Dark Mountain (UK) and Fire Season I and II (Vancouver). Her poetry films have screened at Zebra Poetry Film Festival (Berlin) and at +the Institute [for experimental art] (Athens), as well as in Dublin and Seattle. Her current project is “walk quietly / ts’ekw’unshun kws qututhun,” a guided walk at Hwlhits’um (Canoe Pass) in Delta, BC, featuring contributions from artists, scientists, and Hwlitsum and Cowichan knowledge holders.