A thin fire runs through me

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How is she become a desolation, a place for beasts to lie down in. Each line a strip of skin torn from me.

In A thin fire runs through me, Kim Trainor interrogates what it means to exist, to navigate the quotidian amidst the constant drip-feed of political and ecological disasters.

Written over an intense nine-month period in 2016 and 2017 amidst the stresses of heartbreak, depression, and the progression of a new love, Trainor’s exquisite sequence of short poems offers meditations on different hexagrams in the I Ching, or Book of Changes. Incorporating fragments from reportage on current events, Jewish liturgy, and lyric poetics, she latches her readers to the present while acknowledging the inescapable presence of the past.

A thin fire runs through me grapples with Trainor’s own personal circumstance while contemporaneously documenting the tenor of our times, suggesting that “We peer into other lives; we absorb words, headlines, violent events. We see and we don’t see. These scraps are unintegrated, unintegratable, yet we carry them.”

Contributors

Kim Trainor

Kim Trainor is the author of the poetry collections A thin fire runs through me; Karotype, described by Don McKay as “a crucial text in the work of reimaging what it is to be human;” and Ledi, a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award. Her poems have won the Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Prize, the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, and the Great Blue Heron Prize. Her poetry has appeared in the Best Canadian Poetry and Montreal Poetry Prize anthologies, as well as many journals, including Dark Mountain and Anthropocenes (AHIP).
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