Devolution

Devolution is a collection of quirky, reality-bending poems and fables of extinction and ecological unraveling are haunting and unforgettable. Devolution is Kim Goldberg’s eighth book and her personal act of extinction rebellion. The poems and fables span the Anthropocene, speaking to ecological unraveling, social confusion, private pilgrimage, urbanization and wildness. Using absurdism, surrealism and satire, Goldberg offers up businessmen who loft away as crows, a town that reshapes itself each night, a journey through caves so narrow we must become centipedes to pass. Goldberg’s canvas holds both the personal and the political at once, offering rich layers of meaning, but with a playfulness reminiscent of Calvino or Borges. Each imaginative narrative will haunt the reader long after the book has been put down.

Kim Goldberg is the author of eight books of poetry and nonfiction. Her surreal and absurdist poems and fables have appeared in magazines and anthologies in North America and abroad. Her first poetry collection, Ride Backwards on Dragon, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Red Zone, a collection of poems on urban homelessness, has been taught in university literature courses. In 2016 she released Undetectable, her haibun journey through a lifetime of Hepatitis C. Her earlier non- fiction books were published by New Star Books and Harbour Publishing. Kim holds a degree in biology from the University of Oregon and is an avid bird-watcher and field naturalist. Before turning to poetry, she was a freelance journalist covering environmental issues in publications such as Canadian Geographic, Nature Canada, This Magazine, Georgia Straight, The Progressive, Columbia Journalism Review, BBC Wildlife Magazine and numerous other magazines in Canada and abroad. She lives on unceded Snuneymuxw territory (Nanaimo, BC), where she is known for creating poem galleries in vacant storefronts and staging guerrilla poetry happenings in weedy waysides.