Kim Goldberg: RED ZONE Poetry Reading/Talk

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Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
7:00 PM

Is poetry the new journalism? Join award-winning poet, journalist and author Kim Goldberg for a reading from her latest book RED ZONE, followed by a discussion of local homelessness and the role of poetry in today’s society.

Approximately 300 people live and sleep on the streets of Nanaimo. Kim Goldberg spent three years verse-mapping and photographing the town’s back alleys, graffiti galleries, underpasses and homeless camps to create RED ZONE. The result is an extraordinary book reconstructing a landscape of urban decline through a stunning combination of poem, image, artist projects and journal entries until the city itself becomes a persona speaking to us in the samizdat of cities everywhere – graffiti. And Nanaimo sheds its local identity to become a universal emblem of global culture in decay.

Goldberg’s tumble down the rabbit hole of broken glass and shattered lives ultimately lands her in her own smouldering red zone of passion, obsession and shame. “I can no longer discern where the political ends and the personal begins. The deeper I push into this swollen red midden of hidden box springs and open books, the more my own flesh burns,” she writes in RED ZONE.

The book, published last fall by Pig Squash Press, went into its second printing after just seven weeks and has now been adopted as a literature course text at Vancouver Island University.

Kim Goldberg’s work has been widely published around the world in magazines, newspapers and anthologies including Macleans, Canadian Geographic, Vancouver Sun, Geist, Tesseracts, The Capilano Review and elsewhere. She is the 2008 winner of the Rannu Fund Poetry Prize for Speculative Literature. Her previous poetry collection, Ride Backwards on Dragon, was a finalist for Canada's Lampert Memorial Award. She is also the author of several nonfiction books. RED ZONE is her sixth book.

Everyone is welcome to attend this event. We hope you will come share your own thoughts and ideas about homelessness in Nanaimo and beyond, and the role that poetry and the arts in general play in today's Brave New World.