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.”

Kim Trainor is the author of Karyotype (Brick Books, 2015), Ledi (Book*hug Press, 2018), and A thin fire runs through me (Goose Lane Editions, 2023). Her latest book is A Blueprint For Survival (Guernica Editions, 2024). Her poetry has won the Gustafson Prize, The Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize and The Antigonish Review’s Great Blue Heron Poetry Contest. In 2018, she was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Trainor’s work has appeared in the 2013 Global Poetry Anthology and The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2014. She lives in East Vancouver.

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[The poems] 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.

Wanda Praamsma, Toronto Star

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

rob mclennan