Downverse

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 constellation 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.” Paying close attention to musicality and her own poetic process, Reimer 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?”

He had everything he had hoped to have by that age – a well-paying job, a new house, a fancy car, true love – but he still couldn’t shake his jitters. What the hell do you know about layout, anyhow? And so, on the afternoon of the actual day, he swung by his doctor and had several units of Botox injected into the slight furrows in his brow. It was past midnight when we realized that the sunscreen we were wearing had sparkles. Thirty may have felt old to him, but there was no reason he had to look it.