Description
<p><i>How is she become a desolation, a place for beasts to lie down in.</i><br>Each line a strip of skin torn from me.</p><p>In <i>A thin fire runs through me</i>, Kim Trainor interrogates what it means to exist, to navigate the quotidian amidst the constant drip-feed of political and ecological disasters. </p><p>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>I Ching</i>, or <i>Book of Changes</i>. 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. </p><p><i>A thin fire runs through me</i> 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.”</p>