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.
Each year, Dwarf Stars showcases the editor’s pick of the best science fiction poetry of 10 lines or less that was published the preceding year. This year’s editor was Charles Christian.
My poem is a triolet, which is an 8-line French form dating to the 1300s. The triolet has a very specific scheme of rhyme and repeating lines: ABaAabAB.
“Garden” was first published last year in my book Devolution (Caitlin Press, 2020).
The Benefactor ascended the mountain with the help of a jetpack, a topographical map and a mule-train we did not see. (For these aids would be cheating.) Or rather, we wrapped our eyes and stuffed our ears with daisies, to not observe the exhaust plumes from her heels. Or the raucous braying from randy mules. Or the cries from challengers as each tumbled off the cliffside of our shame and naiveté into a pit of ash at the base that slowly filled their mouths and lungs, embalming them.
The Benefactor sailed up the crag with an unnaturally smooth gait. Like those actors in a Jacques Tati movie, pulled across the stage on dollies out of frame. Days became nights became days. Her stylized ascent continued its hypnotic pace as Canada geese flew back and forth to the estuary that was ablaze. Their wings became scorched and left wispy trails of smoke behind their V formation.
We shouted up at the Benefactor to check on the geese and the fire from her lofty height. But like a Chinese dragon, she had ears that could not hear. And she had never before seen geese or fire, so would not know how to assess them even if she could hear.
From our ant farm below, questions were muttered about the constellations that had shifted their age-old position in the night skies to form a halo around the Benefactor’s rising dome.
We grew restless waiting. Someone fired up a rousing chorus from Marat/Sade. We were hungry for change. So we barbecued a mule that had fallen off the trail, as well as two geese that dropped from the sky, already barbecued.
The Benefactor was now out of sight in the sooty haze of climate fires. We realized we needed a better plan for eternity. So we began tunneling beneath the blistered earth, excavating a hibernaculum large enough to hold us all.
I was honored to have a poem of mine included in Issue #5 (“Rhythms”) of Consilience, which is a peer-reviewed journal exploring the spaces where science meets poetry and art.
My poem “Codex Exterminarius” is featured both in print and as an audio recording where you can listen to me read it.
The editors of Consilience ask each artist/poet to supply a short statement commenting on the science that underlies our piece. Here is mine:
“Codex Exterminarius” is a mapping of our cultural genome in an age of post-peak oil. Each pair of conjoined words at the centre of every line is car model names. The bonding letters conform to the molecular structure of DNA by replicating the Adenine-Thymine (A-T) and Cytosine-Guanine (C-G) base pairs that cement the double helix.
Every genetic code is a narrative assembly pre-configuring a developmental trajectory. The trajectory of this cultural genome would appear to open with idyllic bliss (“sonatA=Tempo”) and conclude with apocalypse (“omegA=Talon”).
The setting for the poem is the Nanaimo Estuary on Vancouver Island, where young salmon (smolts) with their large black eyes hide in the eelgrass before going out to sea. In Nanaimo Harbour beyond the estuary freighters stacked high with new cars from Europe (via the Panama Canal) are anchored before unloading. Despite car-makers naming so many models after animals, that will not forestall the mass extinction our cultural genome appears to be hurtling us toward.
Nanaimo Estuary, Vancouver Island, Canada. (Kim Goldberg photo)
I have just received a 12-hour ban from twitter for tweeting that my doctor has prescribed ivermectin for me as prophylaxis/prevention against Covid-19.
Banned from twitter for 12 hours for saying this.
Not only can the public not be allowed to know that there are existing effective anti-viral treatments available for Covid-19, the public now also cannot be allowed to know that there are doctors who are prescribing these treatments to their patients. And achieving good results. And saving lives. Many lives.
This is a ridiculous level of censorship and suppression of information we are now living with.
As Salman Rushdie wrote decades ago in his novel Shame,
“There are things that cannot be said. No, it’s more than that: there are things that cannot be permitted to be true.”
Earlier I blogged about My Ivermectin Journey So Far. I am continuing with the ivermectin prophylaxis protocol, which involves taking my 12 mg dose of ivermectin once every two weeks, as per this protocol from the Frontline Covid Critical Care Alliance of doctors (FLCCC), who have been saving lives worldwide with this approach.
Ivermectin Prophylaxis Protocol for Covid-19 Prevention (Frontline Covid Critical Care Alliance)
And if I become symptomatic, I will shift up to the FLCCC’s protocol for Early Outpatient Treatment with ivermectin, which involves increasing to daily dosing.
Ivermectin Early Outpatient Protocol (FLCCC)
Full details of this protocol are found here on the FLCCC’s website.
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
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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.
