Blue Thinks Itself Within Me - by Kim Trainor (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Part autotheory, part activist manifesto, and part ode to the oldgrowth specklebelly lichen, this book about making poems in an age of ecological desperation is both heartbreaking and beautiful.

Blue thinks itself within me chronicles the poet Kim Trainor's experiences as an activist at the Ada'itsx / Fairy Creek blockade to prevent logging of Vancouver Island old growth forests, where she woke at 4:00 a.m. to boil water on a camp stove and wait for the police to arrive at the standoff. The two-year blockade on logging roads and in tree-sits became the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history--this multi-genre work brings the reader to the front lines of the fight for human and non-human survival in a climate catastrophe.

Trainor asks what, if anything, ecopoetry can do in the face of intensifying extraction of ecological capital. Can poems incorporate non-human species, like the oldgrowth specklebelly lichen that thrives in Fairy Creek, into their very form? How can poetry resist the urge to "capture" the non-human object and instead approach nature with sympathetic care? How might a poem offer an opportunity, like sunlight penetrating a clearing in the forest, to think about nature, to approach, and to be approached by the nonhuman? How might poetry contribute to a co-making of the world with more-than-human-species?

Review Quotes

""Blue thinks itself within me mesmerized me. This isn't only a book of experimental poetics, it is an urgent call for ethical witnessing.""--Orchid Tierney, author of looking at the Tiny: Mad lichen on the surfaces of reading

""Powerfully delicate and precise. Kim Trainor excavates personal and political history and takes an approach to narrative that crafts research as poetry. I couldn't put it down.""--Renée Sarojini Saklikar, author of children of air india

About the Author

Kim Trainor has won the Gustafson Prize, The Malahat Review's Long Poem Prize, and The Antigonish Review's Great Blue Heron Poetry Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry in English, Global Poetry Anthology, and Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees. She lives in Vancouver.