Nikki Reimer
Biography
Reimer’s fourth book of poetry, No Town Called We, was longlisted for both the Raymond Souster and the Pat Lowther Memorial Awards.
GRIEFWAVE.com, a multimedia, web-based, extended elegy, has been performed to creative writing classes and community death care series. GRIEFWAVE was partially supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Other poetry books are My Heart is a Rose Manhattan, DOWNVERSE and [sic], which was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.
Creative work, non-fiction essays and critical writing on death, grief, feminism, poetics, and embodied anti-capitalist practice have appeared in journals like Arc, Order of the Good Death, Maisonneuve, The Rusty Toque, Capilano Review, and trade anthologies like Locations of Grief; Watch Your Head; Against Death; GUSH; and Modern Loss: Candid conversations about grief.
Reimer's creative practice extends to multi-media, performance and collaborative projects in visual, performance and music contexts, though she views the breath line as her basic compositional unit.
Micro-interview
I read poetry in high school, and used to inscribe my favourite song lyrics in my exercise books, and onto one particularly punk pair of jeans. My very favourite poem from late adolescence is Frank O’Hara’s “Song (Is it Dirty),” which made it’s way into my first book of poetry as an epigraph. O'Hara's tone is both exulting and blunt, poetic, but anti-whimsical. "That's not a thought, that's soot." The city is dirty, and we love it.
I’ve been writing poetry since I was a child, and started thinking of myself as a poet when I was in high school.
A poet’s job is to challenge mainstream culture’s definitions of the world, to explore and annotate the world as they see it, and to define new ways of being that open space for inclusion and safety.
“Trust Fund Witches” by Emma Healey. I love the assonance, alliteration, sensual glittery imagery. The scene Healey weaves is as gritty as O'Hara's odes to New York, but Healey reminds us about the capital that underpins bohemian luxury. These witches have "glittering auras," they're fashionably lo-fi, but with wealth that allows them to move through walls. Who belongs? Who owns? Who stays?
