Nanaimo poet Kim Goldberg is broadening her view from the local to the global.
More than a decade after releasing Red Zone, a book of poems, journal entries and photographs on the topic of homelessness in Nanaimo, Goldberg has turned her gaze to another longtime concern: the environment.
This month she released Devolution, a diverse collection of surrealist poetry focused on the environment, while also touching on technology and the way humans relate to themselves and the world.
“I’m looking at environment in a big way in terms of all of these things being interrelated,” Goldberg said. “I mean, if we want to look at environment just in terms of planet, oceans, forests, atmosphere, we have to actually also look at the state of society that we’re in which has led us to this rather corrupted state of environment.”
Goldberg said she’s seeing human society and “everything we know on planet Earth” returning to a primitive state, and the title of the book comes from those observations.
“It never really works for me to just translate that in a direct, on-the-nose way in which, ‘Oh, woe to the world. The oceans are polluted and the forests are on fire,’” Goldberg said. “Things just get sifted through a strange filter in my mind and come out in bizarre, absurd, fantastical narratives and that’s basically led to the surrealist quality to all of the work in this book.”
The writings include prose and free verse poetry, as well as structured poems like sonnets, palindromes, pantoums and triolets. Goldberg said likes to keep “switching it up” because repeatedly reading similarly styled poems page after page can be “narcotizing.”
The book also touches on ideas of the Earth reclaiming itself from civilization and that humanity’s impact on the planet, while noteworthy in the present, may prove unremarkable on the scale of geological time and ultimately “the planet may continue without us.”
“These statements sound very dismal and gloomy and my approach to things – and I’m not really even doing it deliberately, it just comes out this way – is more to look at how wild and wacky it all is,” Goldberg said. “And so the content of the book would normally be defined as absurdist and I will say that the darker the world situation gets … the more fantastical and far-out and ridiculous and absurd my writing becomes.”
Devolution is available online here.
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