Kim Trainor, A thin fire runs through me

 

And when you are gone I embalm you
with words. Remove the tongue. Remove the eyes.

When they ask me about you, I say I’ve moved on.
There’s this boy with an oud.

Always behind the barricades – no way in.
Your mouth a void.

So it was Hexagram 23 after all. Stripping. Flaying. Splitting apart.
The typewriter cracks letters open. Splintered words.

My face is riddles with holes.
All night I was digging at your grave. (“BLUEGRASS”)

Vancouver poet Kim Trainor’s third full-length poetry collection, after Karyotype (London ON: Brick Books, 2015) [see her ’12 or 20 questions’ interview from back then] and Ledi (Toronto ON: Book*hug 2018), is A thin fire runs through me (Fredericton NB: Icehouse poetry/Goose Lane Editions, 2023). As she offers in the book’s introduction:

A thin fire runs through me began involuntarily, as a way of writing my way through a difficult time; the title poem functioned as a response to heartbreak, followed by depression, and eventually, the progression of new love. I wrote steadily over a period of about nine months, from late summer 2016 through the spring of 2017, roughly one poem every two or three days, each poem a meditation on a different hexagram from the I Ching. The quotidian became interwoven with the political and the ecological. Through selection and juxtaposition of fragmented details, these hexagrams aimed to grapple with my own personal situation and to document the tenor of this time.

Composed as a book of changes and responses, the structure of seeking external prompts is reminiscent of Kingston writer Diane Schoemperlen’s debut novel In the Language of Love (1994), a book composed via one hundred chapters, each one based on one of the one hundred words in the Standard Word Association Test. Whereas Schoemperlen was attempting to prompt and progress her narrative, Trainor’s purposes are far more meditative, working from the opening poem sequence-section, “BLUEGRASS,” through a selection of numbered poems across cluster-sections “THE BOOK OF CHANGES” and “SONG OF SONGS.” Her poems are reactive and responsive, offering phrases, images and sentences as both clusters and layerings, accumulating across each particular meditation. As each poem progresses, she works from and through her immediate via a different prompt, from the endings of one relationship and the beginnings of another, and all else that falls amid and in-between. “I wait until the marquee for you.” she writes, as part of poem “33.,” “Our second date. Cohen’s name in lights.” As the poem ends, further down: “As you stand next to me. In the red light of the Fox / there’s a tower of song.”

The poems included in the second and third sections, which make up the bulk of the collection, are each numbered, but not set sequentially: nine follows fifty-two, which follows forty-nine, for example. As poem “60.,” set mid-point in “THE BOOK OF CHANGES,” opens: “Jie. Articulating. / The joints that divide // a bamboo stalk. Spine. / Tongue. // Touch the edges of words – / Radical talk. Glottal. Stop.” Held together as a singular unit, the poems that make up A thin fire runs through me offer a collage of images and references from that particular period of compositional time, from bicycle wheels in Vancouver, sex and forms of the Sabbath to quotations by US President Donald Trump, displaying that era of upheaval and change through a sequence of meditative prompts. The poems aren’t working to seek order from the chaos, but are a record of her own processes of chaos, and her meditations through them. “And who will die today of fentanyl? / And who by law? // Inject the burning shot, / euphoria rushing. And then the dark.” (“21.”).

The poems saunter, casually, moving from moment to moment across a wide spectrum: “I have not seen you in five days.” poem “64.” offers, two-thirds through the second section. “When we meet / you tell me of all the creatures born at dusk, between worlds. // The frogs who are disappearing. / Their translucent skin. // Created at twilight on the eve of the Sabbath, / these defective creatures who cleave neither above nor below.” As her introduction continues:

The quotidian offers us up minutiae – tweets, Instagrams, texts, social media posts, online news. We peer into other lives; we absorb words, headlines, violent events. We see and we don’t see. These scraps are unintegrated, unintegrable, yet we carry them. At times, only poetry seems an adequate medium of response.

A fourth full-length collection, A blueprint for survival, is scheduled to appear with Guernica Editions in spring 2024.