Victorians often turn a blind eye to street people. Me too, I confess. Perhaps deep down we're a little frightened that, due to some awful circumstance, we could join them one day.

Nanaimo poet and former teenaged hell-raiser Kim Goldberg takes the opposite tack. Her new book, Red Zone, is a "verse map" of the Hub City's homeless population.

To research her poems, prose and photographs, Goldberg haunted squats, back alleys and graffitied railway yards. Sometimes she wandered through a notorious Nanaimo park, not far from her home (a 1930s coal-miner's cottage) where bodies of the homeless have been discovered.

Here, from Red Zone, is a sample verse from her poem, Immaculate Conception. It sums up with great conciseness the plight of someone living on the street: small dog in plaid coat trots past sleeping bag, leaves frosty stitch of paw prints Her photographs portray such things as a Canada Post box with the felt-penned message "To buy crack cross street;" a man sleeping (or unconscious) under an overpass; a discarded condom lodged in a wire fence; a broken easy-chair in a parking lot.

It's certainly not mainstream commercial fare. I'm not surprised when Goldberg tells me Red Zone is self-published. Yet it's no vanity project, either -- she's far from an amateur dabbler. Goldberg has had tangible success as a writer, with five previously published (mostly non-fiction) books. Her poems have appeared in literary journals. Her journalistic articles have appeared in reputable magazines such as Maclean's and Canadian Geographic.

An intelligent and vivacious woman, Goldberg self-published Red Zone for several reasons. Feeling a certain journalistic urgency, she wanted to get it out quickly, rather than waiting months via the conventional publisher route. As well, she believed most publishers would refuse her unorthodox mix of photographs and writing.

The book was done surprisingly inexpensively; total cost was just $1,700. Goldberg had 300 copies printed at Victoria's Island Blue for just $5.42 a book. She designed it herself on Microsoft's Word. Charging $18.95 a book, she's almost sold out her first run of Red Zone.

One of the first things that got Goldberg interested in Nanaimo's homeless (estimated by the city to number 300) was the bull-dozing three years ago of scrub on a vacant lot near her Prideaux Street home. This exposed a makeshift base for homeless folk --lawn chairs, a Rubbermaid box used as a table and shelving tied to rebar. Of course, when their "living room" was revealed, the street people didn't return.

Before the bulldozing, Goldberg strolled by regularly, completely oblivious to the underground world behind the bushes.

"I was walking through their front porch, essentially," she said. "That had a really profound effect on me." Her curiosity has taken her to a Nanaimo railway yard where crackheads and prostitutes squabble. She's wandered through empty squats -- once even hearing someone moving about in the next room. She has watched a desperate woman trying to yank the head off a change-filled parking meter with a wrench. At the Pearson Bridge overpass, Goldberg has investigated the tunnel that street people have dug through sand. The tunnel leads to an area behind a retaining wall which provides them a safe place to sleep.

How many of us would possess the moxy for such a project? It sounds a little dangerous. Goldberg admits: "I have a lot of friends who actually think I'm nuts to be doing this." She calls her writings "the poetry of witness." By this, Goldberg means she's not trying to befriend the homeless or to further their cause -- although Red Zone has this effect simply by focusing on the issue of homelessness. It was primarily an artistic impulse that spurred her to write the book.

Goldberg is especially critical of Nanaimo's so-called "red zone." This is a designated downtown area from which undesirables are prohibited. The notion is to deter drug dealing and prostitution, but, the poet says, patrolling the red zone also keeps the needy from downtown social services.

Her dislike of the police-enforced red-zone is loosely linked to her past. Goldberg grew up in Coos Bay, Ore. As a teen the late '60s/early '70s, she was a hard-core juvenile delinquent: car-theft, drugs, break-and-enter. From the age of 15 to 17, she was subject to "various forms of incarceration in juvenile facilities." The incorrigible Goldberg was even banned from Coos Bay county by a judge she'd appeared before one too many times. Her family was forced to move to Eugene, eventually relocating to Vancouver Island so her brother could avoid the draft. Later on, she got her act together, attending university and taking a biology degree.

This background is partly why she's drawn to investigating the Hub City's unsavory neighbourhoods. Goldberg has empathy for those living outside the confines of regular society.

"It's almost addictive," she said. "I almost cannot not do it." Kim Goldberg's Red Zone is sold in Victoria at Dark Horse Books, 623 Johnson St., and Munro's Books, 1108 Government St., and in Nanaimo at Falconer Books, 650 Terminal Ave., and the Thirsty Camel Café, 14 Victoria Cres.

BOOK READING What: Kim Goldberg will read from Red Zone When: Nov. 27 at 7:30 p.m.

Where: The Black Stilt Coffee Lounge, 1633 Hillside Ave. (at Scott Street), in Victoria Admission: $3