Desolation by Kim Trainor

Kim Trainor has made the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for Desolation.

The winner of the 2019CBCPoetry Prizewill receive $6,000 from theCanada Council for the Arts, have their work published onCBC Booksand attend a two-week writing residency attheBanff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from theCanada Council for the Artsand have their work published onCBC Books.

The shortlist will be announced on Nov. 14, 2019. The winner will be announced on Nov. 21, 2019.

• 33 writers make the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize longlist

About Kim

Kim Trainor is the granddaughter of an Irish banjo player, a Sweet Adeline, a prairie girl who ran a men-only boarding house in East Vancouver and a Polish faller who worked in the logging camps around Port Alberni in the 1930s. Her second book, Ledi, was shortlisted for the 2018 Raymond Souster Award and describes the excavation of an Iron Age horsewoman's grave in the steppes of Siberia. Her next book is Bluegrass. She teaches at Douglas College and lives in Vancouver, unceded homelands of the xmkym, Skwxw7mesh and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

Entry in five-ish words

Wandering into Dark Mountain territory.

The poem's source of inspiration

"6th mass extinction."

First lines