Un poemario bastante particular, no se si me terminó de gustar, tendria que releerlo y ganas no tengo. Aun asi, tiene una buena prosa y es una lectura rápida.

Thank you NetGalley for the chance to read and review this book.

This book was unfortunately very very boring for me and I did not like it. This may be to someone else's taste, but not mine.

Kim Trainor’s “A blueprint for survival” is like a carrier bag, a poetry volume containing emails, recipes, dialogues and philosophy, news pieces, journals in the footnotes noting date and carbon parts per million (rising), the experience of covid-19 lockdowns, declarations from climate activists, indigenous leaders & extinction rebellion, graphics and pictures of seeds, screenshots and sketches. Divided in two, with part one exploring the relationship with the land and a loved one during wildfire season, and part two detailing the “blueprints” of seeds and other entities, this book holds a multitude of things, beings and ideas, and it’s hard to sum up. It lends itself to slow reading, being quite heavy in the second part, each poem exploring an entity in its own particular way - a dal recipe for lentil, a sequence, quotes from scientists or the impending doom of news. The footnotes, which appear in the second part and detail the author’s journal during Covid-19 restrictions, add to the world of the collection, which is both living and dying, constantly faced with the ecological, climate, and extinction crises.

Inspired by the Ecologist’s 1972 Blueprint for survival, Kim Trainor imagined: “I’d write a series of blueprints, schemata; of human artifacts and other organisms that expressed resilience, that might survive whatever devastation we’ve unleashed, whatever is coming down. Blueprints became seeds I gathered. Words. Scraps of ideas.” (p. 82). Indeed, the volume mixes lyricism with the harsh language of news and direct, specific vocabulary of science, intermingling descriptions of hiking in nature with philosophical dialogues about the value of non-human lives or the ways in which activist organizing develops. My favorite parts, the ones I wrote down, were always the poetic endings of these meanderings, whether full of hope or despair:

“There is no clear way. I will venture out along white tracks. Mark ink on green-ruled numbered pages. Lay down strips of black carbon. Scatter signals of plutonium and nitrogen, Tupperware, chicken bones, lead. Absorb radionuclides. Take shelter. Mourn. Make fire. Write poems. Conserve. Despair. Decay.” (p. 16, from Iridium)

“Our technologies. Our alphabets and poems. Our rituals. The stories / we tell of our future. We can interrupt the usual signals. / We can’t go back. But we can go sideways. We can change.” (p. 114, from Sars-Cov2)

“We stood in time, / looking into the galactic centre, looking into ourselves - these temporary / sentient forms, bodies of fusion ash and starlight.” (p. 120, from Gaia)

Thanks to Net-Galley & Guernica Editions for the E-arc!

This book just isn’t for me. It was bad by any means. The poems were well written and researched. It’s just no my cup of tea personally. I don’t really like or read poetry about romantic love. I also am not really interested in biology/ecology which is how all the metaphors were written and were a big chunk of the book. I would recommend it if that’s stuff that interests you, but it wasn’t for me.