Department of American Culture and Literature faculty member Assistant Prof. Jennifer A. Reimer has a new book of poetry. “The Rainy Season Diaries” was published by Quale Press in November 2013.
In “The Rainy Season Diaries,” notes the publisher, “[Prof.] Reimer speaks from the far-flung spaces of diaspora and migration, not only the geographical and physical, but also the emotional and literary.
Playing loosely with the diary form, each page can be read like an entry in a journal…that explore[s] the potential of a lyric (but acidic) voice that finds itself washing up on multiple shores of metaphor. The voice is fretted with narrative traces, which minutely examine the manner in which the stories we tell and the titles we give each other are themselves forms of treachery.”
The American poet Elizabeth Robison writes about the book: “Jennifer Reimer measures accumulation and loss in ‘The Rainy Season Diaries.’ Intimacy is played out against myth, geologic tension, oscillations in atmosphere. ‘What occupies the remainder?’ Reimer asks insistently, passionately, often erotically. This oldest of stories is revivified here in ways that capture its utter uniqueness. Like the poet, we cannot help but ask, ‘How many of the strange places are even more striking because most people don’t know they exist?’”