Downverse
Nikki
Reimer. Talonbooks, $16.95 paperback (128p) ISBN 978-0-88922-854-2
In
Downverse, Calgary poet Nikki
Reimer’s second trade poetry collection, she explores the immediate cultural
language of Vancouver housing, subjectivity, dysfunction, displacement and
social media, including hashtags, YouTube videos and online commentary, as well
as the very nature and purpose of writing itself. The quote that opens the
collection, credited to an “inebriated audience member at a poetry reading”
reads: “I hated your poem. / Your poem was so boring.” Further on in the
collection, one of the quotes that opens the section “that stays news” reads:
“only a poet would say that the reason
non poets don’t like poetry is because they don’t understand it. and therein
lies the real problem. it’s not the poetry that is disliked. it is the poets
who deliver it in such a way that they think they are somehow better, fairer,
superior creatures than the rest of us that turns the stomach. you wrote some
words that may or may not rhyme. you memorized them. you said them in front of
people. they clapped. or didn’t. good for you. now go cure cancer.”
The
author of a small handful of works, including her first trade collection, [sic] (Calgary AB: Frontenac House,
2010), and two chapbooks—fist things
first (Windsor ON: Wrinkle Press, 2009) and that stays news (Vancouver BC: Nomados Literary Publishers,
2011)—Reimer’s work has long been engaged with the social concerns of a number
of other West Coast language poets connected (in even the most tangential ways)
to the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver (a city she recently returned to
Calgary from)—such as Stephen Collis, Kim Minkus, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Jeff
Derksen, Soma Feldmar, Cecily Nicholson and Peter Culley—and yet, the poems in Downverse display a distrust of those
same systems of language, and how they retain and even create a distance
between the author and reader. The poems in Downverse
are centered in rage, boredom, grief, confusion and despair. Reimer displays a
mistrust in the poem, while concurrently stretching the scope of what just
might be possible. As the poem “television vs. the real” opens:
we watched Dr. Phil who told us to get a job!
& take responsibility for our
marriages!
& create equal partnerships on an
emotional, physical
& financial level!
the ultimate
truth! … a phallus, I confess
we watched Tyra who told us to forget
about money
& stop selling our souls to our jobs
Dionysus cannot
ensure you
an accomplished
sexual relationship
we watched Oprah who challenged the truthiness
of the memoir
what lengths men
go to make Woman exist
(June
2014)
Purchase
Downverse HERE.
