The Mystery of the Siberian Ice Maiden: Kim Trainor on Poetry, Death, and Memory

For this episode of The Transmute Tapes, we speak with Kim Trainor — a Canadian poet, teacher, and author based in Vancouver, whose work moves between poetry, ecology, memory, grief, and the ethics of attention. Trainor is the author of several books, including Ledi (2018), a book-length poem shaped around the excavation of the Siberian Ice Maiden, and her most recent book, Blue thinks itself within me: Lyric poetry, ecology, and lichenous form, published in February 2026. Her website also describes her earlier 2024 poetry collection A blueprint for survival, which traces wildfire, climate crisis, and forms of resilience. 

We first came into contact with Kim Trainor through a shared fascination: the figure often known as the Siberian Ice Maiden, the tattooed Iron Age woman unearthed from the frozen Pazyryk burial grounds in Siberia. In Trainor’s Ledi, this discovery becomes a poetic investigation — one that follows the archaeological record, but also opens onto grief, intimacy, memory, and the strange force with which the dead continue to address the living. The book has been described by Trainor and its publishers as a work centered on the excavation of this ice-bound horsewoman and the preserved traces found with her: tattoos, grave goods, botanical remnants, ceremonial detail. 

For Maison Douce, the Siberian Ice Maiden became the starting point for a different artistic gesture: The Siberian Ice Maiden flag, conceived as a portal and a trigger — an artwork that invites confession, projection, and the release of buried knowledge. In this conversation, we were interested in the point where these approaches meet: how one ancient figure can move across time and enter the present through radically different forms, awakening both poetic language and visual ritual.

In the episode, we talk about what it means to be seized by a presence from the distant past. What is it that allows an unearthed body, an image, or a fragment of story to reach across centuries and still act upon us? What kinds of artistic responsibility emerge when we work with the dead, with excavation, with remains that are at once historical and deeply symbolic?

We also speak about the ethics of unearthing the past: when recovery becomes revelation, when it becomes appropriation, and how artists might remain attentive to both beauty and violence in such acts of return. The Siberian Ice Maiden is not simply a subject here, but a meeting device — a figure through whom questions of memory, ritual, history, embodiment, and artistic care become newly charged.

Along the way, Kim reflects on her writing process, on poetry as a form of listening, and on the role of nature in her work. Her practice reveals a deep attunement to the more-than-human world, and to the way landscape, weather, plant life, and ecological crisis enter language. That sensibility also extends into her latest book, Blue thinks itself within me, which brings together ecopoetics, activism, and her experience as a forest defender at Ada’itsx / Fairy Creek. 

This episode is a conversation about artistic kinship, ancient remains, poetic form, and the mysterious ways certain figures keep calling to us. It is about art as a site of encounter — between past and present, body and image, language and ritual.

Content note: this episode includes references to death and suicide. Listeners who prefer not to engage with these themes should skip this episode.

Shownotes:

Kim Trainor:
https://kimtrainor.ca/

Kim' s books:

Ledi: https://kimtrainor.ca/ledi-2018/

Blue thinks itself within me: https://kimtrainor.ca/blue-thinks-itself-within-me-lyric-poetry-ecology-and-lichenous-form/

Artwork:

Talking to Ghosts by Maison Douce: https://www.maison-douce.com/artworks/talkingtoghosts

Book recommendations:

Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/455147/is-a-river-alive-by-macfarlane-robert/9780241998212

Theory of Water by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson: https://www.leannesimpson.ca/portfolio-books/theory-of-water