Your cart is currently empty!
Beautiful Books: Kim Trainor’s Karyotype
Last week we included Karyotype, the debut collection of poetry by Kim Trainor, as part of our new year’s resolution to read more new, emerging, diverse voices. Not only did the content of this collection — an investigation of human values and culture through the physical — catch our eye but the cover image was so striking, we had to know more. We asked Alayna Munce, editor and production manager at Brick Books, to share with us the story behind the unique cover image. As a bonus they included an excerpt from the collection, too!
They peel her desiccated beauty—
soft-petalled husks of chestnut brown,
her skull in its silken pod—tease
open the parchment skin to flesh
stitched through with blue-dyed veins and pearls
of bone. What are they looking for
in their protection of white mask
and gown? I sit next to my daughter
who turns her face from their grim task
but I look, and my son looks too
into the Beauty of Loulan
preserved in our luminous blue
glass capsule, with all the others—
the Cherchen man, the toddler
with a flat stone on each eye,
the man sewn up with horsehair sutures
at his slender neck. Microscopic views:
white blood cells smeared across a slide
stained with Giemsa dyes, methylene blue and
azure A, B, C to show
the chromosomal bands of dark
and light. We watch this
in the dim twilight of our den,
my own small band of humans
eight, five, and not-quite-two,
transfixed by television’s light
and incontrovertible skin.
Scientists now reach into her cavities,
extract woody shreds of dried leaves—
she has become leaf, pale flowers
interred. Pliny the Elder wrote
of “Serae” with flaxen hair and blue eyes
who made an uncouth sort of noise
by way of talking. We watch bright
threads of her DNA unwound
and read from left to right
and learn her history. But where is she,
in the blue-stained karyogram,
this desiccated woman
this Beauty of Loulan, this beauty?XIXA word tries to work its way through
her mouth dried wide open in death,
past the circlet of broken teeth
and the swollen tongue that filled the gap
in her dried seed head.
But she is all stitched up—
her lips fine strings that draw her taut,
her skin still delicate
tapestry of threaded gold,
finely lashed seams that close each lid
and braids that bind her skull.
Only the dark red chin strap failed
to hold her closed, so her mouth gapes
in death. And I would hold it closed
for her, and gently seal her lips
but for this word she’ll never speak.XXIIII peel back ivory leaves,
bone petals, to the bruised image
of this Beauty
of Loulan. Furred chrysalis
on white enamel,
handful of dried leaves.
Her scorched face slips through
the split chestnut hood
and cusp of fur.
Twig legs pierce the split husk
of her. She is becoming new,
some other thing that moves through
what she once was. I study her
closely through the long afternoon
as the rain pours down,
glancing up to trees skinned with moss
in the green flickering gloom,
a castle’s ruins strewn
across the living room floor.
But always back to her dark form.
What am I looking for
in her slim body like a root
or iris corm
that carries tamped within
a genetic script of unfurling blue?
There is no sequence
that can describe her.
No karyogram
to take the imprint
of this woman.
But still we scrape off letters
from her parchment skin,
which she endures,
the chrysalis
scored and split
as she rises
from the page
leaving only a drop of ink
and the discarded husk
of her skin.* * *Thank you to Kim and Alayna for sharing the story behind the cover of Karyotype, as well as the title poem from this wonderful debut collection!Tagged:
