Blue thinks itself within me: Lyric poetry, ecology, and lichenous form

Part autotheory, part activist manifesto, and part ode to the oldgrowth specklebelly lichen, this book about making poems in an age of ecological desperation is both heartbreaking and beautiful.

Blue thinks itself within me chronicles the poet Kim Trainor’s experiences as an activist at the Ada’itsx / Fairy Creek blockade to prevent logging of Vancouver Island old growth forests, where she woke at 4:00 a.m. to boil water on a camp stove and wait for the police to arrive at the standoff. The two-year blockade on logging roads and in tree-sits became the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history—this multi-genre work brings the reader to the front lines of the fight for human and non-human survival in a climate catastrophe.

Trainor asks what, if anything, ecopoetry can do in the face of intensifying extraction of ecological capital. Can poems incorporate non-human species, like the oldgrowth specklebelly lichen that thrives in Fairy Creek, into their very form? How can poetry resist the urge to “capture” the non-human object and instead approach nature with sympathetic care? How might a poem offer an opportunity, like sunlight penetrating a clearing in the forest, to think about nature, to approach, and to be approached by the nonhuman? How might poetry contribute to a co-making of the world with more-than-human-species?