books
No Town Called We
Talon Books, 2023
No Town called we
No Town Called We writes through the death of elders, social panic, and the climate crisis via the lens of the multiply disabled, female-coded body approaching midlife. Punching through the veils of complacency and greed that shape the cultures of the petrostate, these poems are meditations on an emergency, dispatches from wombat burrows and prairie hospitals. They consider the variegated forms grief can take, both marking and resisting their own decay.
Long-listed 2024 Pat Lowther Memorial Award
Long-listed 2024 Raymond Souster Award
Listed on CBC Books’s “34 Canadian poetry collections to watch for in fall 2023”
“intense and witty, sweet and sullen, calm and spontaneous … Reimer says what we all wish we could and what we all wish we had”
My Heart is a Rose Manhattan
Talon Books, 2019
My Heart is a Rose Manhattan
My Heart is a Rose Manhattan is a darkly humorous book about grief and isolation. The poems are cutting yet tender; sorrowful yet filled with righteous anger, absurdist at times but still recognizable, reassuring us that “it’s ok to grieve forever.” There is death and loss, architecture, alcohol, horse statues, and catalogues of life away from the urban centres of Canada. This book wants to “subvert the literary industrial complex,” but also crash in like the Kool-Aid meme with all-caps non sequiturs and “overdrawn affluenza.” These poems are addicted to social media and simultaneously well versed in feminist theory. Some of the poems rail against the abuses of rape culture, asking: What is excusable? Who is implicated? Who is believed?
“My Heart Is a Rose Manhattan... is an existential reaction to city and state, told with a heaping dollop of fugue and refrain”
DOWNVERSE
Talon Books, 2014
DOWNVERSE
DOWNVERSE soothes the oversaturated reader. A natural translator, Reimer writes for anyone who has felt overwhelmed by the phrase “never read the comments.” Reimer has read all of the comments; paying close attention to musicality and her own poetic process, she guides found text into whiplike stanzas with original typos intact.
Conscious of its birthplace, DOWNVERSE crafts both an ode to and an elegy for Vancouver’s middle-class, Gen-Y, millennial angst, and even Vancouver itself – not the physical place, but rather the idea of #Vancouver, presented through images plastered over billboards and stamped into Special Edition footwear. In its shifty way, Reimer’s text alternates between the voices of Vancouver’s youth- and consumer-driven populace, asking the question, “What happens when The Market is the Way, the Truth, and the Life?”
“humorous and sharply critical. Reimer immerses her writing within the conditions of millennials ... DOWNVERSE intervenes into and reconfigures the linguistic materials of new media to work through these issues in a way that is reflective of the disjunctive information age, but also critical of the conditions that come with it. …”
[sic]
Frontenac House, 2010
[sic]
[sic] thus written, error mine. Sic to incite to attack, especially as a command to a dog: “Sic 'em!” Siccing poetry on you. That’s sick, as in, awesome. Or ill and sickly. Either way, the (gendered, sexualized) body is implicated. [sic] re-writes a feminist lyric within the long shadow cast by neo-liberalism upon the city and its denizens, mis-remembers the lines and re-inscribes the labour and commerce and sexual negotiations that take place there.
Short-listed 2010 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
“[sic] is a giddy, whimsical and expertly timed series of fake-outs and sucker punches. Corporatism, sexism and intellectual sloth all get brought out for questioning in a series of wild, gesticulating poems…Reimer’s voice is both dexterous and savvy”