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?

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.

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"[My Heart is a Rose Manhattan is] darkly funny by not shying away from how unfunny death can be"—Jonathan Ball, Winnipeg Free Press

"My Heart Is a Rose Manhattan... is an existential reaction to city and state, told with a heaping dollop of fugue and refrain."—Quill & Quire

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"[My Heart is a Rose Manhattan is] darkly funny by not shying away from how unfunny death can be."—Jonathan Ball, Winnipeg Free Press

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"Reimer has fashioned a remarkably genuine poetic voice."—Arc

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"[My Heart Is a Rose Manhattan] is rich, it is complicated, it demonstrates incredible skill, and it rewards the reader."—Prairie Fire

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"My Heart Is a Rose Manhattan... is an existential reaction to city and state, told with a heaping dollop of fugue and refrain."
—Quill & Quire