Join the Organism for Poetic Research in celebrating Nikki Reimer's newest book of poetry, My Heart is a Rose Manhattan (talonbooks, 2019)!

A former member of the Kootenay School of Writing, Nikki Reimer writes from, against, out of, under and across the internet, the (m)anthropocene, the capitalocene, the poetry scene, the settler state, the literary industrial complex, and the on-going apocalypse, from trauma, grief, rage, and the oil-based economy of Calgary, AB. Fuck you and the horse statue you rode in on.

Urayoán Noel is a stateless poet who fluctuates between island and mainland, between print, body, and web. Urayoán Noel is never quite incorporated, but always in corps orated, non-mono-aural, and attuned to modes of resistant lingurality. Keep them herd melodies, give us those unstated ones. Let others blog the slog, we’ll unfurl #unstatements in the digital fog.

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Nikki Reimer (she/her) is a carbon-based life form of Ukrainian and Russian Mennonite descent who lives on the traditional territories of the people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta. She writes poetry, essays and criticism, yells on the internet, and makes digital art. Published books are My Heart is a Rose Manhattan, DOWNVERSE and [sic]; several more are in-progress. Creative and non-fiction work has appeared on stages, billboards, public art exhibits, pop-up bistro menus, and in various magazines, journals and anthologies. She may or may not be undead.

Urayoán Noel is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico (University of Arizona Press, 2015), as well as the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa Press, 2014), winner of the LASA Latina/o Studies Book Award. As translator, his works include the bilingual edition Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poetry by Pablo de Rokha (Shearsman Books, 2018), longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award, and the chapbook No Budu Please by Wingston González (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018). His non-print work ranges from durational performance and text-sound-video installations to collaborative projects with musician/composer Monxo López, artist Martha Clippinger, and dancer/choreographer Alethea Pace, among others. Noel has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and CantoMundo. His vlog is wokitokiteki.com.

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The Organism for Poetic Research (OPR) is a critical-poetic platform for the making and studying of work in poetry and poetics. The OPR was started in 2011 by a group of then-NYU English graduate students, Daniel C. Remein, Ada Smailbegovic, and Rachael Wilson, in order to think through the ways our scholarship—rooted, respectively, in medieval poetics, science and poetics, visual studies and poetics—was intersecting through this shared term, as well as through our collective engagement with contemporary poetry, both as readers/audience and practitioners.

OPR projects take a number of forms: seminars, readings, installations, film screenings, books, digital residency projects on our website, and Pelt, a sporadically published magazine (in print and online) wherein each issue is organized around a newly minted concept—the skin of space, the ravanastron, scipulp poetics, feminist temporalities—that is first loosely articulated through a call for work and further elaborated through contributions to the issue.

The OPR puts poetics—which we understand as the making and study of poetry, as well as the study of systems and structure—at the fore of all its activities, with the aim of pursuing ideas and art practices across disciplinary and epistemic divisions.