[sic]

by Nikki Reimer

[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.

Reviews

Gorilla condoms? Goldilocks’ bent-over cootchie? Gonzo cocaine? Everything’s 4-sale when language is loosed as it is ici (icy) (sic). These poems are a pile-up of pop culture at “the intersection of Art and Commerce”, and the city is caught at the stoplight.

—Jury, Dektet 2010

Walter Benjamin did not work at Tim Hortons. Nor did he “work at the local earl’s and never leave the neighbourhood.” But who doesn’t love cities and their edges? That doesn’t mean we have to walk around like flaneurs. Most people have to drag their bodies to work and make their bodies work. What would poetry that asks “does anybody work here?” look like, how would it make and break a sentence? What city would this poetry make its capital of modernity? How would such a poetry love a “stucco shithouse”? This is to say that Nikki Reimer’s [sic] is a book that Henri Lefebvre would love because it is wild in the way he wanted cities to be.

—Jeff Derksen

The poems in Nikki Reimer’s remarkable new book, _, stubbornly violate the breath line, salute drive-by aneurisms and prince charles maxi-pads, and take innocent testicles hostage as they expose the nostalgic underbelly of subverbia _[sic]. “Remember if there’s smoke,” Reimer cautions, as she continually unremembers the gentrified and gendered ex-city. Poetry for the reactionary-challenged; before gobbling up this yummy dirt and mucus and icing-sugar die[t], you might prefer to slap on a condom, or an extra ovum.

—Nicole Markotic