Devolution is Kim Goldbergs 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. Goldbergs 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 nonfiction 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. Originally from Oregon, Kim and her family came to Canada in the 1970s as Vietnam War resistors. 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.
"The biotariat remains a mere rumourthe possible politics we might find in true solidarity with the resurgent and animate non-human. To think our way back/forward (devolving/evolving) into the embrace of the animal, Kim Goldberg is here to remind us that our voyage is necessarily surrealjust above the trappings of what we have decided to call real, where the universe is still left ajar. All seams are unraveling. Fish declare the emergencies that humans too often will not. Do not go in fear of personification or anthropomorphismits just the way the animal world has always spoken to us, encouraging us to cross the little burning bridge over the swelling stream we call the present. Stephen Collis
Reading this book is like touring an end-of-the-world library of thought. Encountering the Special Collection we don the required white gloves; later, we view a chilling Temporary Exhibit in which the homeless are the only survivors of a sonic attack. Goldberg depicts a world gone cyber-mad: a tumble of techno-cultural contexts beyond my control and does so deftly, using a combination of ultra-realism with flourishes of the surreal, even offering a fishing derby where the salmon cast lines and fish for humans. Fantastic in both senses of the word this collection is one you wont soon forget. Heidi Greco, Flightpaths: The Lost Journals of Amelia Earhart (Caitlin, 2017) and Practical Anxiety (Inanna, 2018).
In Devolution, Kim Goldberg is a climate-voyant, offering visions of time-warped ecologies and malignantly inverted processes of nature. Blending apocalyptic imaginary with late-capitalist moralism, Goldbergs near-future is a place where the human
is no match for the laws of physics or fabulist fiction. This is a world in which the landscape can get up and walk away, as if tired of human hubris, yet where new animals might take up the role of evolutionary mistake-makers. This is a vision of the cosmos that sees accountability without accusation, where we are as innocent, or as guilty, as stars imploding with self-awareness. Sonnet LAbbé, author of Sonnets Shakespeare"
