In this quick-witted collection of poems, Nikki Reimer mines the language of new media – hashtags, YouTube comments, Twitter updates – to defamiliarize the very substance of modern life: the Ingram CoreSource of media-enforced ideals that barrage our newsfeeds, daily commutes to #work, and (mostly online) excursions to the (Apple) store. #nuffsaid
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?”

NIKKI REIMER (she/her/they/them) is a multimedia artist and writer and chronically ill neurodivergent prairie settler currently living in Mohkinstsis/Calgary. She has been involved with arts and writing communities, primarily in Calgary and Vancouver, for over twenty years. They are the author of four books of poetry and multiple essays on grief. GRIEFWAVE.com, a multimedia, web-based, extended elegy, was launched in February 2022. Frequent themes Reimer explores through their work include feminism, the body, the Anthropocene, late capitalism, death, grief, loss, and animal subjectivity.Though their practice began in the literary arts, Reimer's artistic work has taken turns into multiple forms of interdisciplinary artmaking, including visual art and video, installation work, and performance practice. "Trigger Warning," a play commissioned by Swallow A Bicycle Theatre Company for their ten year anniversary retrospective, explores how gossip and the whisper network can both combat and reify rape culture within Canadian cultural circles. Reimer's work has been extensively reviewed, often noting their embrace of dark humour and feminist refusal. Visit reimerwrites.com.

Nikki Reimer's profile page

“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.”
– The Small Press Book Review

“… if Downverse succeeds where other works in a similar mien do not, it is because Reimer articulates a counter-grammar to its own cliché-laden registers. What Reimer ultimately delivers is a poetics of conjunction itself, a poetics in which even disjunction is a form of joining. Downverse is the reliquary appropriate to this alchemy of joining, and the multifarious, obstinate objects you will find within it become ever more fascinating as you turn them over in your hands.”
– Ethos Review

“Nikki Reimer’s DOWNVERSE registers the commotion of noise when it’s pronounced choice in the heated work of poetic composition. Right there, at the edge of the word, the phrase, the pronoun, the vortex of the sudden twists in the urgency of procedure. Her poetry has more to do with being there than getting there; each moment in the language opts for the next now. The advantage of total assault in this performance is understanding by immersion. Placed, justifiably, in the pantheon of recent city poems, the section ‘vancouverlament’ opens with ‘haute action material,’ a title that also accurately underscores this collection of writing as hot!”
– Fred Wah

“humorous and sharply critical. Reimer immerses her writing within the conditions of millennials – a generation of supposedly disappointed and disenfranchised persons faced with social, economic, and political uncertainty. Employing tactics of erasure, collage, and unconventional typography, 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. … Both a lament and an expression of frustration, DOWNVERSE perfectly captures the cynicism of a generation, but also represents a desire to find a pathway out of these mired conditions. ”
– Canadian Literature