BIOGRAPHY

Nicolette Reim is a poet, visual artist and translator published in Mojave River Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Poetic Sun, The Rail, Glint Literary Journal, wwwtheartsection and recent anthologies Border Lines, Poems of Migration and Rumors Secrets & Lies, Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion & Choice, and other publications. She studied art at The New York Studio School and holds a Master Degree of Fine Arts in Poetry with a Concentration in Translation from Drew University. She exhibits abstractions based on longhand and topography at NohoM55 Gallery, NYC. She lives and works in NYC and Atlanta, GA.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Many who write a lot, as I do, often also make visual work. The poet Mark Strand (1934-2014) put it like this, “I started making collage as an escape from making meaning. I got tired of writing poems, of trying to make sense – verbal sense.” He reiterates the relief of making another kind of sense – visual sense, where language does not intrude. The alphabet, about preserving and understanding thought, is easy to learn. The invention of type did away with any further real development in letter shapes. They evolved into silhouette image-shapes, originally little pictures. Prose and poetry writers ponder how to creatively get the best understandings. It doesn’t satisfy to place text in ways that make any kind of order impossible. The language of painting gives the possibility of a different kind of coherence. In any case (pardon the pun), our current pandemic time of confinement and frustrations lends itself to emotional rewards of seeing all those letters chained in pre-determined fashions, released to dance to other rhythms. Street posters are often unreadable, battered by weather and unforeseen circumstances – my works keep a bit of decorum, a bit of past identities, like most of us try to do in difficult, unfamiliar circumstances.

Email: reim.maus@comcast.net