Kim Trainor



Kim Trainor is a Canadian poet. Trainor was the recipient of the Fiddlehead's 2019 Ralph Gustafson Prize and the Malahat Review's 2013 Long Poem Prize.

Trainor's work is particularly concerned with ecology, grief, and memory. Her first book Karyotype was published by Brick Books in 2015. George Elliot Clarke described the book as a "recollection of the organized violence that is war and/or tyranny" and noted that the book's focus on remembrance placed her in the lineage of World War One poet John McCrae. Trainor's second book Ledi was published by Book*hug. Focusing on the controversial excavation of the Siberian Ice Maiden, the book continues the poet's elegiac themes, with a focus on the Iron Age horsewoman's role in society. The book was a finalist for the 2019 Raymond Souster Award presented by the League of Canadian Poets.

Her most recent work has focused on ecological grief and resilience. A thin fire runs through me appeared with icehouse poetry (Gooselane Editions) in 2023. A blueprint for survival appeared with Guernica Editions in spring 2024. Wanda Praamsma has described this book as "one we should all attempt to absorb." Rob McLennan observes "There is a thickness to her lyric, writing undergrowth and foliage, of trees and scientific names....There is something of the long poem combined with both the poetic diary and book-length essay that Trainor offers in this collection, articulating crisis and climate but expanding into an agency of archival research and illustrations; she writes asides and footnotes and prose stretches through a lyric framework in an impressive book-length package. This is a highly ambitious and heartfelt collection, one that even provides echoes of the detailed lyric researches of one such as Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris, attending to the big idea through an accumulation of minute details. The scale of this volume is incredible. I don’t know how to begin."