Welcome toPig Squash Press!You have arrived at the cyber-home, alter ego, publishing imprint and creative conduit connecting me – Kim Goldberg – to the rest of the planet (and possibly beyond). Join me as I blog about books, poetry, and more!
My latest books are:
Devolution(from Caitlin Press, 2020), surreal poems and fables of ecopocalypse. This is my eighth book and my personal act of extinction rebellion. The poems and fables span the Anthropocene, speaking to ecological unraveling, social confusion, private pilgrimage, urbanization and wildness. “She can write lines that literally take your breath away, and creates images that will remain with you long after you close the book.” – Vancouver Sun
Undetectable, a lyrical journey through illness, wellness, Hepatitis C and virus as metaphor. I lived with Hepatitis C for 45 years before being cured in 2015 with the breakthrough new drug Harvoni. I wrote Undetectable in the Japanese literary style of haibun – a travel diary paired with haiku – as I wandered the streets and forests of Nanaimo, BC, during my 84 days of treatment, meditating on all things undetectable.
RED ZONE, a graffiti-strewn poem diary of homelessness in Nanaimo, BC, where I live. More than 300 people live and sleep on the streets of Nanaimo. RED ZONE has been taught in university literature courses. Reviewers have compared it to the writings of Allen Ginsberg, Marge Piercy, and John Steinbeck.
So make yourself comfy, have a boo at my blog postings about literary happenings and other current events, leave a comment, walk your dog, order a book or two, follow me on Twitter @KimPigSquash, like me on Facebook.
I took my second dose of ivermectin today for the Covid prophylaxis protocol. The prophylaxis protocol involves dosing on Day 1 & Day 3, and then just taking one dose every two weeks thereafter. If I develop Covid symptoms, I’ll increase to daily dosing for five days and get tested. But I won’t wait on test results before shifting to the daily treatment protocol.
My dose (based on body weight) is 12 mg. The formula for calculating correct ivermectin dose for Covid prophylaxis and early outpatient treatment is 0.2 mg per kg body weight. Higher doses are used for severe Covid in hospitalized cases, where results have been remarkable. Doses in those applications range from 0.3-1.0 mg/kg.
This low dose (0.2 mg/kg) is the same dose that has been used for more than 30 years to treat parasites in humans around the world, with 3.7 billion such doses delivered for anti-parasite use over the decades. So this drug and this dosage of it have an extremely well documented safety profile that has stood the test of time, unlike various other approaches to Covid we are being offered.
In addition to ivermectin’s Nobel Prize-winning anti-parasite action, it turns out to also have considerable antiviral and anti-inflammatory properties at this same low dosage, hence its effectiveness for treating Covid-19.
AVAILABILITY IN CANADA
In Canada, ivermectin is legally sold in pharmacies under the brand name Stromectol (from Merck). But you need a prescription to buy it this way. Most Canadians are reporting that their GPs are unwilling to write the script. But some medical professionals in this country do understand the importance of making ivermectin available to patients for prophylaxis and early treatment—especially a so-called “high-risk” patient such as myself.
I suspect he is now flooded with calls from people across Canada desperately seeking their own ivermectin prescription to protect themselves and their loved ones. I hope more Canadian GPs will follow his lead and start doing the right thing for their patients.
PRICING IN CANADA
Buying ivermectin with a prescription (if you can obtain one) at a Canadian pharmacy is the most expensive way to acquire ivermectin, which is an incredibly cheap, old, safe, off-patent drug that costs pennies to produce. Each box shown in my photo contains 4x 3mg tablets, or 12mg per box. Exactly my dose. And each of those 12mg boxes costs me $36 at a Nanaimo pharmacy. So every dose of ivermectin I take at my body weight (125 lbs), costs me $36 if I buy it “officially” with doctor’s prescription.
You can buy an equivalent 12mg dose of ivermectin from numerous online pharmacies selling generic versions (usually from India or Mexico), and requiring no prescription, for about $10 or less, for what costs me $36 in Nanaimo with a prescription. The online approach is not as risky as it sounds once you start asking around and get good leads on online stores that other people are using successfully. Even if you have the money to buy the branded drug at your local pharmacy, you may not have the luxury of a prescription to enable that.
These realities are driving the large and growing market of online purchasing from generic pharmacies abroad. The many stores listed on IndiaMart appear to be legit (they would get delisted quickly if they weren’t). People are getting their drugs, the drugs are working.
And then there is always the horse paste at feed and seed stores (or via Amazon). Yes it’s really ivermectin. Yes people all over the world are using it successfully to treat and resolve Covid. No there are no other drugs in it unless listed on box (although there may be apple flavour!).
I’m not making any recommendations yea or nay. Just sharing my own journey and what I have learned so far.
Here is your chance to listen to me read 3 fables from my latest book, Devolution (tales of ecopocalypse).
I was delighted to have “Armadillo,” “Constant Comment,” and “Rabbits” included in Dark Mountain’s Fall 2020 anthology Fabula – a tour de force collection of uncivilised fiction and art from writers and artists around the world. The Dark Mountain staff got some of us to voice our stories for you, and here are my three!
I was thrilled to wake up Saturday morning to find Tom Sandborn’s rave review of my new book Devolution in the Vancouver Sun.
He bills it an “elegant and ferocious collection of poems and fables. Like Magritte and other surrealist painters, Goldberg is fascinated by dream-like images dredged up from the muck at the bottom of the mind, and she deploys these images to reflect on our intertwined crises of environmental collapse and social injustice.”
From the review: “Goldberg creates a dream world in her writing, full of nightmarish loss, fragmentation and decay juxtaposed with shards of radiant, resonant beauty. Like Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne, Goldberg shows us where to look amongst the garbage and the flowers.”
And: “She can write lines that literally take your breath away, and creates images that will remain with you long after you close the book.”
The pandemic has been hard on poets. Especially those of us with new books. No coffee shops or libraries or other cool haunts where we can perform our words and connect with a live audience.
I was scheduled to launch Devolution on March 21st, World Poetry Day, at Nanaimo Harbourfront Library. But by the time that date rolled around, lockdown had commenced and the library (like most other establishments) was closed so we could all shelter in place and head off a potential crisis that could flatten our health care resources.
Poets have had to carve out and invent new methods of sharing our work in the last three months. Online launches and readings with Zoom and other crowdcasting platforms, for example.
Thrilled to unveil the cover for my latest book: Devolution – poems of the ecopocalypse.
The cover art is a 1934 painting, “The Collective Invention,” by legendary Belgian Surrealist artist René Magritte.
Devolutionwill be released by Caitlin Press in February 2020. I hope to bring it to an open mic or festival or reading series near you. One planet is all we’ve got!
From the catalogue:
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.
Had a wonderful time today visiting with three fellow author friends and TWUC members in downtown Nanaimo this sunny afternoon at a sidewalk table at Serious Coffee as the world passed by on Commercial Street. My compatriots were Della Burford, Sylvia Sikundar and Sandy Duncan.
The four of us have been friends for decades as a result of our membership in The Writers’ Union of Canada. I have known Sandy even longer, as she was the author friend who recruited me into TWUC back in 1990 after my first book was published.
TWUC has been an important organization to me professionally, which is why I initially joined all those years ago. Great help from staff on contract negotiation! And authors everywhere in Canada, whether TWUC members or not, today enjoy annual income from Public Lending Right (for library use of out books) and from Access Copyright (for photocopying of our work), thanks to the work done by TWUC years ago and up to the present.
But for me, the greatest benefit of my TWUC membership has been the many wonderful friendships I have made with authors elsewhere in BC and across Canada over the years through our TWUC annual national conferences and our more frequent regional meetings with potluck socials.
Authors Della Burford, Kim Goldberg, Sylvia Sikundar, Sandy Duncan
I am honoured to announce that I have just signed a contract with Caitlin Press for my next poetry book, currently titled Devolution.
Devolution will be my 8th book and is my personal act of Extinction Rebellion. The poems and fables speak to ecological unraveling, social confusion, private pilgrimage, wildness, cities, The Anthropocene. Stylistically, one might use labels like absurdism, surrealism, fabulism, speculative, slipstream, satire.
For a sneak preview of Devolution, have a look at my poems on the Dark Mountain website, where I am currently the Featured Mountaineer. All of my writings published in Dark Mountain anthologies over the years will be included in Devolution.
I have been working on the poems in Devolution for about 12 years. And as some of you know, I have been engaged in the fight of my life against 2 different cancers for the last 4 of those years. (Both cancers are currently in remission, I am happy to report. And 2019 is looking like it will be a very auspicious year for me, entering it as I am with good health and a publishing contract for the new book!)
As my health spiralled ever lower in the last 4 years, my poems about planetary collapse and ecopocalypse began to resonate eerily inside my own collapsing body, as though macrocosm and microcosm were locked in some perverse pas de deux.
But my mind, being what it is, is only able to translate loss of this magnitude into absurdism and strangeness. So if you’re looking for gloom and doom and hand-wringing, Devolution will not be the book for you.
Devolution is scheduled to be released in Spring 2020. I hope to be bringing it to a festival or open mic near you.
I leave you with this sample, “Atlantis,” originally published in OJAL.
I am honoured to be included in the recently launched book from Mansfield Press:Another Dysfunctional Cancer Poem Anthology, edited by Priscila Uppal (RIP) and Meaghan Strimas.
As many of you know, I have now survived (or am in a state of surviving) two cancers: Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia and Anal Cancer. (The latter is caused by the HPV virus in most cases, including my own.) So the mission of using poetry to excavate the complexities of cancer and its effects upon our bodies and psyches and relationships–that is a mission I wanted to be a part of. And luckily for me, I was chosen by these two editors.
The book is available directly from the publisher. Or you can find it in quality bookstores and on Amazon.
My contribution to the book is my poem ‘Transported,” which you can read here:
And here I am in my late-autumn garden showing off my two contributor copies of the anthology. I held the image of my garden in my mind and in my belly each day while undergoing radiation this past summer. My garden is the externalization of my life force energy.
If you’re a fan of speculative literature, you’ll want this collection, featuring more than 70 poets, in your library of the spooky and strange.
My own poem “What Remains” was inspired by my frequent wanders through an abandoned industrial wasteland near the Nanaimo River Estuary by my home on Vancouver Island. It is a setting rich with mysterious objects, forgotten story, unnamed spirits.
Undead is available from Apex Publications as a trade paperback ($15) or an eBook ($4).
RT @HWarlow: ‘Let us Find the Beauty in this Storm’ by Tara Turner Photography and Digital Mixed Media work. British Columbia Canada B… 7 hours ago
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Welcome to Pig Squash Press! You have arrived at the cyber-home, alter ego, publishing imprint and creative conduit connecting me – Kim Goldberg – to the rest of the planet (and possibly beyond). Join me as I blog about books, poetry, and more!
Devolution (from Caitlin Press, 2020), surreal poems and fables of ecopocalypse. This is my eighth book and my personal act of extinction rebellion. The poems and fables span the Anthropocene, speaking to ecological unraveling, social confusion, private pilgrimage, urbanization and wildness. “She can write lines that literally take your breath away, and creates images that will remain with you long after you close the book.” – Vancouver Sun
Undetectable, a lyrical journey through illness, wellness, Hepatitis C and virus as metaphor. I lived with Hepatitis C for 45 years before being cured in 2015 with the breakthrough new drug Harvoni. I wrote Undetectable in the Japanese literary style of haibun – a travel diary paired with haiku – as I wandered the streets and forests of Nanaimo, BC, during my 84 days of treatment, meditating on all things undetectable.
RED ZONE, a graffiti-strewn poem diary of homelessness in Nanaimo, BC, where I live. More than 300 people live and sleep on the streets of Nanaimo. RED ZONE has been taught in university literature courses. Reviewers have compared it to the writings of Allen Ginsberg, Marge Piercy, and John Steinbeck.
Ride Backwards on Dragon: a poet’s journey through Liuhebafa – finalist for Canada’s Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. A collection of 66 linked poems following the 66-move sequence of the ancient martial art of Liuhebafa on a mythic quest for internal alchemy and immortality. Visit my Liuhebafagirl blog for deets.
