At the heart of Karyotype is the Beauty of Loulan, a woman who lived four thousand years ago, her body preserved in the cool, dry sands of the Taklamakan Desert. Karyotype’s poems range from the title sequence, which explores the DNA and woven textiles of this woman and her vanished people (a karyotype is the characteristic chromosome complement of a species), to the firebombing of the National Library of Sarajevo, from an abecedarian hymn on the International Red Cross “Book of Belongings” to the experience of watching the televised invasion of Iraq in the dark of a Montreal night. The Beauty of Loulan becomes a symbol of the ephemerality of human genetic and cultural texts, and of our chances for survival.

Kim Trainor is the author of Karyotype (Brick Books, 2015), Ledi (Book*hug Press, 2018), and A thin fire runs through me (Goose Lane Editions, 2023). Her latest book is A Blueprint For Survival (Guernica Editions, 2024). Her poetry has won the Gustafson Prize, The Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize and The Antigonish Review’s Great Blue Heron Poetry Contest. In 2018, she was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Trainor’s work has appeared in the 2013 Global Poetry Anthology and The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2014. She lives in East Vancouver.

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"Karyotype is for me a crucial text in the work of reimagining what it is to be human… I am grateful, as well as inspired, to find an artwork performing this essential task."

Don McKay