Concerned with the disease of modern life, Nikki Reimer’s poetry collection, My Heart Is a Rose Manhattan, thinks honestly about the different ways we experience connection, grief, and womanhood in the urban centers of today. In particular, Reimer explores how city life can skew our relationships to our world and to each other. Whether she’s contemplating how “every minute in the shower kills another acre of ocean” or musing about a “cold-pressed coffee farm,” Reimer demonstrates that she’s doing her best to keep her finger on the pulse of Canada’s urban reality. Between conveying Alberta’s anxieties surrounding the future of the oil industry and examining northwestern British Columbia’s eclectic spirit, the poet’s unfiltered takes on the nation are grounded in the ethos of each province–that is, both the outward reputation they curate and the culture they maintain on the ground.