multimedia Archives - Home of IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd)

13 Jan20220

75 for the 75th – Selected: 2002-2022

In his brand of multiverse, David P. Reiter probes planetary identity as exploratory memoir, ‘tweetem’ snapshots of the mind and body from stress to recovery, and fanzine remixes of Dr Who. In these key selections from the award-winning My Planets: a fictive Memoir, Timelord Dreaming, and Time Lords Remixed: a Dr Who poetical, he tests the limits of genre and text.

The physical edition features colour images and links to external sites intended to spur the reader’s imagination.

ISBN 9781922332851 (PB, 124pp); 140mm x 216mm	AUD $30	USD $20	NZD $33	GBP £18	EUR €20
ISBN 9781922332868 (eBook)	AUD $15	USD $10	NZD $16	GBP £9	EUR €10

Reviews

Here we have a satirical, surreal and insightful narrative that invites readers to click through, look up, chuckle and question everything. In this complex world of prokaryotic spiders, robots, Light Eaters and other science fiction treats, readers encounter poetry that serves as its own Tardis. Using the persona of Dr Who, Reiter warps dimensions and definitions. All is not as it seems though. Beyond the sci-fi fandom and miscellany is a distilled and vital poetry that deserves multiple readings.
– Jayne Fenton Keane, author of The Transparent Lung

Whether you’re a proper Whovian or someone who’s never encountered the Doctor before, you’re going to find plenty in Time Lords Remixed to intrigue, entertain and surprise you. David Reiter’s cunning, elegant poetic recaps of several seasons’ worth of Doctor Who take the Doctor through the most significant regeneration yet: from him to her, from Peter Capaldi’s practitioner of the midlife crisis to Jodie Whittaker’s lighter and more optimistic touch. David Reiter skilfully captures this change in voices, while bringing along for the ride all manner of companions, adversaries, monsters, and recurring characters and themes. Time Lords Remixed is bigger on the inside: climb in.
– Tim Jones, author, and co-editor of The Stars Like Sand

Time Lords Remixed is a collection of poems for Whovians or whoever likes their poetry fast-paced and clever (but not smart-arsed). It’s one for disciples of the time lords, but written by a poet who can turn a tercet or two. Reiter wants to know what makes a good man (it comes up more than once):

I realise I’m
not a good man, or a general, or even
President of the Earth, but an idiot
– (from Death in Heaven)

Why do people talk aloud
when they know they’re alone,
skipping heartbeats in the dark?
– (from Listen)

Sometimes you think you’re in a surrealist dream (also in the manner of the Doctor):

Reality has a glitch in it
as you watch for the trap street
There are only two

ways to escape a quantum shade:
undo your tell-tale tattoo or
unplug the raven’s death counter
– (from Face the Raven)

Time Lords Remixed stitches in references to just about everything (in the manner of the series) from Christie, to Dickens via Valhalla and the rest with a short salute to politics and more deeply to current eternal issues:

At what point does migration become
invasion? The trick is to go opaque,
shapeshift your skin or better yet

your small talk. And fine-tune your grammar
to the edge of visibility. I consider these portals
as I saunter through “Amazing Grace”
– (from The Zygon Invasion)

which feels very much like the life of a poet (or is that just me?).

Inevitably physics comes into it:

How can you doubt that poetry and physics
are the same? They almost rhyme except
when they don’t but even then their tune

begs to be discovered. Most people
frown when they don’t understand,
– (from The Pilot)

There were many things I didn’t understand because I’m not a Whovian, but there was much I did and all of it was interesting. And there are references which can be followed (I did sometimes). You could spend days inside this world if you wanted to. Whatever a day might mean in this world.

Time Lords Remixed is confident. It moves with assurance and intelligence and has something to say, then enacts it:

Trust nothing.
Interrogate everything.

There are some things we should never
proxy to our dreams.
– (from Last Christmas)

– Chris Mansell, author, and publisher of PressPress

In this volume, Reiter presents the reader with a poetic response to his experiences in hospital, as the cause of extreme pain is diagnosed, treated, and operated on.

The short poems inhabit a region between reality and the speculative. The treating doctors merge with images of Doctor Who, and various inhabitants of that Doctor’s universe, or multiverse, appear in the pages. Daleks, Cybermen and equipment such as the sonic screwdriver run shoulders with nurses, spirometers and the dubious properties of hospital food. The result is a vivid and, at times, moving chronicle of the journey through serious illness, and the mysterious world of medicine from the patient’s perspective.

Here is an example, from early in the process of diagnosis, where the poet is in the Emergency Ward:

EW – SUNDAY, MIDNIGHT
"Excluded your heart. Now for the shadows.
My 10#sonic screwdriver will scan for 11#aliens."
Yes, my pain is there, and there – a solid 8.

Immediately apparent is the inclusion of links, which take the reader from the text of each poem into the worlds of the internet. These links are repeated in footnotes. The "aliens" link in the poem above, for example, takes one to a web page outlining identifiable mistakes in Aliens, the 1986 film. We immediately see the hideous attraction of mistakes to someone caught in the terrifying parallel universe of medical diagnosis. The ebook, of course works more efficiently in this regard than the printed book, although one could use the links given in footnotes to explore the added dimensions.

Personally, while I chased some of the links, and found some of them fun or illuminating, I also found the appearance of the poems a little cluttered. At least in the printed book, I would have preferred simple footnotes (or end notes) containing some of the linked information, and the poems presented without the underlining and tags. Others may delight in the intertextual voyages being ticketed from within each poem.

David Reiter dubs the form of these poems, which he writes that he invented while in hospital, the tweetem, which he states is a cross between the "character limited tweet" and "Japanese forms like the tanka". I have to say that I do not like the word "tweetem"; to my ears it sounds too cute. But there is no denying the powerful kick of some of these works, whatever one thinks of that name.

Many people are writing poems combining the exigencies of Twitter and either haiku or tanka, and finding this to be a convenient and portable way of composition without the need for pen, paper, or even sonic screwdriver. A phone is all one requires. At Micropoetry.com, tweeted poems from around the world are brought together, allowing the curious to find poets of interest. Most of the poems here are, in some way, derived from Japanese forms. Tinywords, founded in 2000, is a daily magazine publishing and distributing haiku, tanka and brief haibun by web, email and SMS. Timelord Dreaming can be seen as part of this developing tradition.

This book is disconcerting, amusing, timely and adventurous. It should be of particular interest to those undergoing medical treatment. In reusing motifs from popular culture, particularly that of science fiction, the poet ties deeply personal experiences to those we share through the web and other created worlds.

– P.S. Cottier, Sydney Morning Herald

Illness as altered reality isolates us from the world. Sharp as a scalpel, David Reiter beams trippy tweetems from his hospital bed, cracking sterile walls and piercing us with poignancy.

– Dr Leah Kaminsky, Deputy Editor, Poetry & Fiction, Medical Journal of Australia

In the half-life world of hospitals, pain and medication, Dr Reiter has taken us on his journey into and through his mind. Taking twists, turns and delightful detours, he has developed a new form of digital communication – tweetems. While some draw on visitations of Doctor Who, the tweetems also take us on a myriad of musical and educational voyages. Between sonic screwdrivers and white cell scouts, Timelord Dreaming ensures our normalacy bias will be prodded and deconstructed.

– Anna Maguire, Digireado

At one level, David Reiter’s My Planets is extremely complex (verse, prose poems, autobiography, short fiction, photographs, etc.), but at another it is quite simple. The author, a Jewish only child, at the age of 50 with both his adoptive parents dad suddenly discovers his birth mother, Eileen, and that he is in fact the eldest of seven across the combined families of his genetic parents.

In common with the memoirs of many of other adoptees, Reiter’s also brings out the insecurity the process almost necessarily involves – and the long-standing question, "Why was I given up?" Luckily, Reiter’s adoptive parents were by-and-large supportive, though the death of his father when Reiter was only 11 was clearly a setback.

Reiter grew up in one of the poorer areas of Cleveland, Ohio, where he seems to have been one of the very few white kids in a black neighbourhood. A further isolation was that there were very few Jews in the suburb. His frustrations in this context and well brought out and there is a child-like envy of some of his (adoptive) relatives who live in the richer, white part of town. Reiter’s treatment of this early part of his life is almost a bilungsroman, albeit told in fragments.

What is equally remarkable, however, is the author’s more difficult attempt to capture the life and personality of the birth parents he never knew when young. The social context in the United States cities at the end of World War II is graphically brought out, including the sexual recklessness of the time and the psychological damage experienced by veterans, even by those who (like Reiter’s birth father) didn’t see combat. In prose sections like "What a Girl’s Got to Do" and "Dancing Sinatra", Reiter very convincingly recreates a sense of a woman who is drawn to sexual adventure and who feels that a more luminous fate should await her than her circumstances allow. It’s hard to know how much of this material Reiter heard directly from his mother after he met her again and how much he fictionalised from the raw data his birth family must have supplied after the reunion. In either case, it’s done with both an understanding of the times and considerable empathy and affection.

Some readers may wonder why the book is so consciously fragmented and perhaps why Reiter has arranged his material in terms of the planets of our solar system (and the classical myths associated with them). A part explanation might be that the materials of his book are either remembered in fragments or came to him later in that manner.

Another, perhaps, is to give the story of his early life (and those of his relatives, biological and adoptive) a wider resonance, to place himself and them in more universal context. Some may consider the dramatic monologues spoken by some of the planets as distractions from the "real" story but, as Reiter’s concise outlines of some of their associated myths implies, our human behaviours are often influenced by factors well beyond our own knowledge and/or control (including the eternal patterns of mythology).

My Planets is also available from the publisher as an enhanced eBook, which pushes the fragmentation principle even further by adding more images, sound, music and film."

– Geoff Page, The Canberra Times

"David Reiter’s provocative fictional multimedia memoir combines a textual narrative with a rich tapestry of audio, video and animation to explore the meaning of family, connectivity and identity. The planets provide both a narrative structure and a shifting series of perspectives asking not just how we understand who we are, but how that story shifts with different sets of eyes. This is a profound digital narrative which both makes the most of the various possibilities of the digital realm whilst weaving a provocative, engaging and all too human tale."

– Judges’ Report, WA Premier’s Book Awards

"David Reiter subtitles his latest book ‘a fictive memoire’, which is an essentially contradictary term and at the same time complementary. If ‘fictive’ is make-believe and ‘memoire’ is autobiography, where do the two come together?

In My Planets Reiter weaves memories of his own upbringing as a white Jewish boy in an American inner-city, with present-day musings of a fifty year-old American Australian who has just found his birth mother after his adoptive parents have died. These stories, presumably, are true. He also gives a third-person account of his birth mother’s and father’s memories. These, presumably, are not. And I’m not saying that they are false, it’s just that one cannot write about one’s conception from the points of view of the lovers without using a bit of imagination. After Reiter’s father recounts his nightmares of fighting Nazi soldiers in the war, he writes:

The real moon came out from behind a cloud just then, and he looked so pale to her, like an abandoned child. She eased down, covered him with her body. (26)

This has to be imagined. And it is beautifully imagined. These were my favourite passages in the book.

The book is divided into nine parts, each given the title of a planet. This works as a structural link to the psyche of Reiter who, as a child, always felt he didn’t quite belong and must have come from outer space and who, as an adult, lives on the other side of the world from where he was born, seeing a whole new set of stars. Each first chapter of each part is told in the voice of the specific planet so each planet, too, has a story to tell. This suggests that stories are both ancient and endless, and no particular story carries any more weight than the next. I love the writing of the planets and think them a clever strand for Reiter to work with, but conceptually I think it has been taken too far: the book’s title, its cover, the black and white photographs of the solar system throughout the book. Too much ‘planets’.

Alongside crossing over from fiction to memoire, from first person to third person narration and from human to inanimate narrator, Reiter also plays with form. He weaves poetry into prose, and some memories bear both of those titles. This seems a very natural way for a poet/novelist to write and Reiter seems to do it organically. Yet with all of these juxtaposing styles it is no surprise that the chronology of the telling is all over the place: back and forth, and sometimes repetitive. But this is the way memory works. When we think of a person from our past, we don’t create a timeline of images. We remember in a much more fluid way. Though this doesn’t make for gripping storytelling, it does experiment with memory and art, and so the story is told uniquely. I think the patchwork craft of the book works well for Reiter, placing it in the overall literary genre. But with it comes some confusion as to where all of the names fit into the family, and into which family they fit (we are, after all, talking about two mothers, two fathers, both of their mothers and fathers, several siblings, aunties and uncles and children). A family tree at the beginning of the book would have helped this confusion but, given that the crux of the book lies in its disjointed telling, a little confusion doesn’t hurt.

Reiter is the founding publisher for IP, which is an interactive press publishing poetry and fiction in print, e-books and multimedia. A ‘Reunion Page’, as an accompaniment for the book, is soon to be published on IP’s website, but for now you can visit it on https://www.facebook.com/MyPlanetsReunionMemoir."

– Heather Taylor Johnson, Transnational Literature

I am a writer myself, and this work shows me just how many new tricks the simple book still has up its sleeve. There are some amazing samples of it available online, if you go to https://ipoz.biz/myplanets.

The online version is a knockout multimedia show, but there is more poetry here in this version. I met the author when he won the Digital Narrative category in the 2012 WA Premier’s Book Awards, in which I shared the Children’s Literature category. I heard his acceptance speech, and I had a chat with him after. I sensed that this was something different.

I was right. This is a book I will keep coming back to, for the joy of reading, and also to learn more of my craft. Aspiring writers are advised to do likewise–and aren’t ALL readers, at least in their hearts, aspiring writers?

– Peter Macinnes, Feral Word Herder

21 Dec20200

Outer Space, Inner Minds

ipoz

Ever since humans have looked up, we have been mesmerised by the changeable wonders of an evening sky.

Even more so, they have speculated on the celestial objects that we can see with a naked eye and those beyond the reach of our most powerful telescopes and space probes. We continue ask is there life beyond our fragile atmosphere, our solar system, our galaxy—or are we alone, a cosmic accident in an otherwise lifeless universe? And, if other lifeforms do exist on moons or distant exoplanets elsewhere, what form/s does it take? Is it intelligent, more or less so than we humans are?

The sheer volume of unknowns involved with exploring what might be out there seems daunting to many of us, but this only makes our scientists and the adventurers all the more determined to find answers to the most challenging questions that will engage generations well into the foreseeable future.

For this anthology, we asked artists to respond creatively not only to these cosmic questions but also from an internal angle, from the perspective of a mind trying to make sense of elusive notions of “reality” in time and space, and who we are in the scheme of things. We offered them the freedom to present us with work on and beyond the printed page. So here you’ll find not only stimulating words, but images and audio, and thought-provoking links to external websites that will prompt you to further explore the frontiers of our constantly expanding universe and our responses to it.

ISBN 9781922332394 (eBook, 184pp);
152mm x 229mm

AUD $13

USD $9

NZD $15

GBP £6

EUR €7

Foreword

For thousands of years, humans from all around the world – from different cultures, different regions, different views – have looked up. We have looked up and wondered what was out there? Who is out there? Will we be out there? Why we are here? It was only in fiction that we could get answers to these questions. That was, until recent times.

It is no surprise that many kids want telescopes for birthdays or to be astronauts when they grow up. Knowing and exploring is literally built into our DNA. To be human is to wonder, and there is no better place to wonder than space.
We are living in perhaps the biggest growth in our exploration of the Universe. Technology has allowed us to look wider, peer further, and visit our neighbours in our Solar System. Our ability and knowledge of the Universe has now surpassed the answers that fiction gave us. This expansion gives us a window into an exciting future. One that offers us hope, answers, and a new view of the Universe.

It is safe to say that the Apollo 11 Moon landing was one of the most influential and memorable events in human history. The fact that people use it as the event of which to compare other big events to, “You’ll remember it like the Apollo 11 landing”, shows its importance. For the first time, humans set foot on place that wasn’t Earth. Only 25 years before, the world was at war. It showed what humans could achieve when we aimed high, were driven, and worked together. It brought out the best in us.

Now, our rapid advancements in technology are bringing out the best in all of us. Space is no longer just for rich countries, or a select few. More and more countries are launching probes into space, astronauts into orbit around the Earth, and even looking towards Mars. There are countries that were not even countries when humans landed on the Moon that now have probes in orbit around Mars.

In 2019 alone, three different countries attempted landings on the Moon. China landed on the far side of the Moon, a private company in Israel attempted a landing on the Moon as well as India. For all of human history up until 2019, only two countries had landed on the Moon. In 2019 alone, three more were added to this illustrious list. It doesn’t stop there.

Now, we are not just talking about going back to the Moon, but staying there. What may have been depicted in fiction decades ago, like bases on the Moon, reusable rockets, and mining, are currently being planned for this decade. The Moon is the key to exploration. It allows us an easier and cheaper means to launch into space due to the low gravity and little atmosphere.

The Moon is the gateway to Mars, asteroids, and even further. Exploring Mars is now part of our regular exploration. And it may hold the answer to “are we alone”.
The clear evidence of water having once flowed on the surface of Mars, and water currently underneath the ground, means Mars has a lot of the conditions needed to support life. While the life that we may find is unlikely to be anything big – most likely bacteria or something small, it probably is (or at least was) there. Don’t be surprised that, by the end of the decade, we have clearly found life there. That by the end of the decade, we’d have an answer to “are we alone?”. That indeed, we are not alone.

But if we are not alone, is there someone , or rather something else, out there, looking for us and asking the same questions? Does intelligent life exist?

It was only in 1992 that the first planet around another star, an exoplanet, was detected. We know of thousands of planets, and we think that billions if not trillions more exist. There are about 300 billion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, and we think that most of those stars have planets around them. There could be over a trillion planets in our Galaxy alone, and 20 billion or so planets could be like our own Earth. Then there are all the potential moons that may exist.

When we look at our Solar System, moons of Jupiter and Saturn offer even better places to look for life. Moons like Titan around Jupiter, or the ice- and water-rich moons like Europa are interesting places to explore. Both of these have more water than Earth, and soon, we’ll have probes on them looking for life.

And yet, this is just in our Milky Way Galaxy. There are about 2 trillion galaxies in the Universe, each of these galaxies with billions of stars, and probably planets orbiting around them, and moons orbiting around those planets.
The Universe is a big place. Our knowledge, or rather, our discovery that our Universe is a big place is rapidly increasing. It puts into scale our movement around this planet, and how relatively small we are.

While we are small, when we work together, we can unlock the secrets of the Universe. We can not only look up and wonder, but then solve. We can question and find the answers. The Universe has a lot of secrets out there, but when we humans are at our best, they are not out of our reach.

– Brad Tucker, Mount Stromlo Observatory
Australian National University

Philosophical, descriptive, thought-provoking, evocative. Those are some of the adjectives that sprang to mind after reading Outer Space, Inner Minds, a collection of 80 poems edited by David P. Reiter. To augment the written content, images from NASA and from Dr. Who episodes are paired with some of the poems.

The anthology includes the works of 35 contributors. Building off the title, the collection is divided into four sections: “Outer to Outer,” “Outer to Inner,” “Inner to Outer,” and “Inner to Inner.” The latter section in particular includes a number of thought-provoking pieces, among them Richard James Allen’s “When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be”:

. . . poetry is not just

a clandestine language we are condemned to teach each other

on death row, but a set of keys we have smuggled in

to unlock the internal stratosphere of our freedom

Although new volumes of speculative poetry often hail from North America or England, that’s not the case with Outer Space, Inner Minds. Many of the contributors are based in Australia, and references and descriptions woven into some of the poems reflect that fact.

Many of the entries have intriguing titles like “The Man in the Quantum Mask,” “Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror,” and “Mummy on the Orient Express.” A number of poems tip the hat to pop culture or famous historical figures such as Dr. Who, Pink Floyd, Frank Sinatra, and Agatha Christie. One of the more impactful poems is Mark Tredinnick’s “The Trees on Little Mountain Creek,” which contains the lines:

. . . And how the fire leaps is how

The earth pines for the sky, how long the sky

Has hungered for the ground. And all life longs.

For what it’s not or can’t: a fish to breathe;

The air to swim; the wolf to pasture; trees

To take up their beds; the barn owl not to know.

And we, to forest. But this is just a way

To say: there’s a divinity we know but cannot

Touch, even when it touches us.

Several poems reference the moon, including “Supermoon,” “Full Moon in May,” and “Peregrine Moon.” In Ron Usher’s “The Dark Side,” the moon is personified, becoming The Man in the Moon:

Fairy tales and Pink Floyd

had us believe one side of the cheese

Moon is forever in darkness.

Truth is, half’s merely unseen

because the Man takes the same 28 days

to turn on his axis as he does to orbit Earth.

It’s called tidal locking by those who read poetry

through telescopes, astronomers.

Marion Wighton Packham’s “The River Calls Us” muses on the nature of time: “Water is slipping through our fingers. / And time stands still watching us in that precious moment smirking at our carefree ways.”

Peter Cartwright’s “Time” also resonates:

I dwell or rather exist

at this bone hard time

of cold dark weather

of cold dark change

this time of closure

like the last grand closure

of the Morning Glory that the frost will kill tonight

The poems are not without humor, as seen in Tony Steven Williams’ “Pluto speaks out”: “I have to say how demoralised/ I felt in 2006, when you constructed/ those rules for planetary definition . . .” In addition to speculative references, many of the poems capture the magical moments of everyday life. Turning to another poem by Tredinnick, this one titled “Cycles of the Moon”:

Evening now, the darkness just beginning

To tell, and low above the paddocks, where

The kite was up early getting the hang

Of herself again in the sallow morning light,

Going nowhere very very fast;

The contributors employ a variety of styles, including free verse, rhyming poems, haibun, and prose poetry. While some poems are more powerful than others, the collection as a whole is enjoyable. As an added bonus, Outer Space, Inner Minds provides North American readers with an introduction to some talented poets they may not have previously encountered.

03 Apr20200

Animal Doctor, Animal Doctor — a picture book

ipoz

Heard of a hippo with a sore hip? Or a giraffe with a crick in the neck? Or a monkey with nose-pinching halitosis? Who can come to their rescue? The Animal Doctor, of course!

This book’s rollicking verse and colourful illustrations are guaranteed to delight kids everywhere.

But how will even an Animal Doctor cure a lion with laryngitis? Find out in the crazy, topsy-turvy pages of Animal Doctor, Animal Doctor.

To get into the swing of things, have a listen to the Animal Doctor song.

ISBN 9781922332097 (HB, 32pp); 216mm x 216mm	AUD $26	USD $18	NZD $28	GBP £12	EUR €14
ISBN 9781922332103 (eBook)	AUD $13	USD $9	NZD $15	GBP £6	EUR €7

Reviews

A clever and cute book that fosters a love of nature and empathy with animals and their feelings. It shows just how close animals are to ourselves in that they also have health problems and have things that get sore and need fixing! I think people underestimate the skill and amazing things that veterinarians do and this book really shows just how clever at problem solving vets have to be. And perhaps more correctly, we vets should be called animal doctors! I particularly enjoyed the giraffe with the sore neck and the lion with laryngitis. And the song is definitely the best part of all.

– Dr Kate Adams, Bondi Vet

16 Jan20200

Time Lords Remixed: a Dr Who Poetical

ipoz

Dr Who in fan-verse??

Arguably the most literary of science fiction shows, Dr Who has adapted its time lords and cast of companions and alien threats to audiences across the globe for more than 50 years.

In Time Lords Remixed unapologetic Whovian and digital artist David P. Reiter reimagines the voices of time lords, especially Peter Capaldi and Jodie Whittaker, through a poetic and image remix that spans 50 episodes and includes associative internet links that build on his Western Australian Premier’s Award-winning title Timelord Dreaming.

Read, view, and, via the eBook and audiobook editions, listen, interact – and be amazed!

Sample selections from the book in David’s 75 for the 75th Selected 2002-2022.

ISBN 9781922332134 (PB, 96pp); 140mm x 216mm	AUD $26	USD $18	NZD $28	GBP £12	EUR €14
ISBN 9781922332141 (eBook)	AUD $13	USD $9	NZD $15	GBP £6	EUR €7
ISBN 9781922332271 (audiobook)	AUD $25	USD $18	NZD $27	GBP £12	EUR €14

Reviews

Here we have a satirical, surreal and insightful narrative that invites readers to click through, look up, chuckle and question everything. In this complex world of prokaryotic spiders, robots, Light Eaters and other science fiction treats, readers encounter poetry that serves as its own Tardis. Using the persona of Dr Who, Reiter warps dimensions and definitions. All is not as it seems though. Beyond the sci-fi fandom and miscellany is a distilled and vital poetry that deserves multiple readings.
– Jayne Fenton Keane, author of The Transparent Lung

Whether you’re a proper Whovian or someone who’s never encountered the Doctor before, you’re going to find plenty in Time Lords Remixed to intrigue, entertain and surprise you. David Reiter’s cunning, elegant poetic recaps of several seasons’ worth of Doctor Who take the Doctor through the most significant regeneration yet: from him to her, from Peter Capaldi’s practitioner of the midlife crisis to Jodie Whittaker’s lighter and more optimistic touch. David Reiter skilfully captures this change in voices, while bringing along for the ride all manner of companions, adversaries, monsters, and recurring characters and themes. Time Lords Remixed is bigger on the inside: climb in.
– Tim Jones, author, and co-editor of The Stars Like Sand

Time Lords Remixed is a collection of poems for Whovians or whoever likes their poetry fast-paced and clever (but not smart-arsed). It’s one for disciples of the time lords, but written by a poet who can turn a tercet or two. Reiter wants to know what makes a good man (it comes up more than once):

I realise I’m
not a good man, or a general, or even
President of the Earth, but an idiot
– (from Death in Heaven)

Why do people talk aloud
when they know they’re alone,
skipping heartbeats in the dark?
– (from Listen)

Sometimes you think you’re in a surrealist dream (also in the manner of the Doctor):

Reality has a glitch in it
as you watch for the trap street
There are only two

ways to escape a quantum shade:
undo your tell-tale tattoo or
unplug the raven’s death counter
– (from Face the Raven)

Time Lords Remixed stitches in references to just about everything (in the manner of the series) from Christie, to Dickens via Valhalla and the rest with a short salute to politics and more deeply to current eternal issues:

At what point does migration become
invasion? The trick is to go opaque,
shapeshift your skin or better yet

your small talk. And fine-tune your grammar
to the edge of visibility. I consider these portals
as I saunter through “Amazing Grace”
– (from The Zygon Invasion)

which feels very much like the life of a poet (or is that just me?).

Inevitably physics comes into it:

How can you doubt that poetry and physics
are the same? They almost rhyme except
when they don’t but even then their tune

begs to be discovered. Most people
frown when they don’t understand,
– (from The Pilot)

There were many things I didn’t understand because I’m not a Whovian, but there was much I did and all of it was interesting. And there are references which can be followed (I did sometimes). You could spend days inside this world if you wanted to. Whatever a day might mean in this world.

Time Lords Remixed is confident. It moves with assurance and intelligence and has something to say, then enacts it:

Trust nothing.
Interrogate everything.

There are some things we should never
proxy to our dreams.
– (from Last Christmas)

– Chris Mansell, author, and publisher of PressPress

23 Jan20180

Black Books Publishing (a novel)

ipoz

PhD student Dylan Cashew abandons his thesis on D. H. Lawrence for the uncertain world of top secret aerospace editing, college teaching and then independent publishing. Dogged and even mentored by Lawrence and others from parallel Dimensions, Dylan finds himself immersed in a publishing venture that, with aid of his PR-savvy wife, interjections from the Internet, and a bottomless supply of scotch, nearly goes under before he receives an offer from a Chinese conglomerate that may be too good to refuse.

If you’re an author, published or unpublished, or wished you were one – or someone who’s worked in publishing, or wished you could – this book is for you. (Have we missed anyone?!)

This is David P Reiter’s latest sortie into the satiricsphere of digital narrative. His having won two Western Australian Premier’s Awards with Timelord Dreaming and My Planets Reunion Memoir has done nothing to curb his rash flirtation with innovation. Nearly 200 “internet call-outs” will tempt you away from the central storyline. Can you resist?

ISBN 97819215231670 (PB, 272pp); 152mm x 229mm	AUD $33	USD $24	NZD $36	GBP £16	EUR €19
ISBN 97819215231687 (eBook)	AUD $17	USD $10	NZD $19	GBP £10	EUR €12
ISBN 97819215231687 (audiobook)	AUD $30	USD $20	NZD $33	GBP £15	EUR €18

Reviews

This is a thrilling fast-paced satire of life in the publishing industry that must now navigate multiple universes, consider colliding galaxies, and take instruction from guides such as D. H. Lawrence. All this while the text leaps from Biblical frameworks to internet content, giving a free and complex reading experience that takes in the irrelevancies of time and the breath-taking variations of dimension. You read some text and then you are guided to a short video – sheer delight. It might be music; or the text of Eleven Strange Facts You Didn’t Know – about something; or loud typing pool background effects; or some detailed information on space-time. Be amazed.

The possibilities here would seem to be endless. The technical skill of the whole production is superb. And in case you’re wondering, the characters lead ordinary lives, rendered in regular prose: “After the plane cleared the runway without incident, Dylan was feeling optimistic enough to lash out on a Johnny Walker on the rocks. He realised his interview was that very afternoon but a single scotch surely couldn’t do any harm. The woman next to him ordered an orange juice in what Dylan regarded as judgemental tone.” The characters also drink a fair bit of scotch. Do yourself a special favour and expand your reading universe.

– Carmel Bird, novelist, Winner 2016 Patrick White Award for Literature

If only independent publishing was as enjoyable as this novel about it! David Reiter proves himself to be an accomplished comic writer with an incisive satirical eye. Black Books Publishing is darkly funny.

– David Musgrave, novelist, poet and founder, Puncher & Wattman publishers

Just finished BBP. What a delightful, enjoyable read. And fast-paced. You’ve really created a character here, Dylan Cashew – likeable and real – that kept me awake (for longer than usual) at nights wanting to read more. Subtly funny, sometimes just funny, it was a good insight into the life – ‘misery’ – of small independent publishers, their ‘wannabe’ authors, and from those with a ‘few runs on the board’, the unrealistic expectations. Well done. Mazel tov! Can’t wait to read BBP II. Unless, wishful thinking, you’ve been taken over for a goodly sum by that number one China publisher!

– Barry Levy, author of The Terrorist

16 Aug20160

A Place to Read

ipoz

In this essay collection, Michael Cohen tells us about his surprise encounter with the remains of Frida Kahlo, about his father’s murder, and about his son’s close shave with death on the highway. His subjects can be as commonplace as golfing with close friends, amateur astronomy, birding, or learning to fly at the age of sixty. But he asks difficult questions about how we are grounded in space and time, how we are affected by our names, how a healthy person can turn into a hypochondriac, and how we might commune with the dead. And throughout he measures, compares and interprets his experiences through the lens of six decades of reading.

The tools of the writer’s trade fascinate him as do eateries in his small college town, male dress habits, American roads, and roadside shrines. He lives on the Blood River in Kentucky when he is not in the Tucson Mountains.

ISBN 9781922120922 (PB, 336pp); 152mm x 229mm	AUD $33	USD $24	NZD $36	GBP £18	EUR €22
ISBN 9781922120939 (eBook)	AUD $17	USD $10	NZD $19	GBP £7.5	EUR €9
ISBN 9781922332899 (Audiobook)	AUD $30	USD $20	NZD $33	GBP £15	EUR €18

Reviews

When we call someone “bookish,” we’re usually thinking of the classic bookworm who encloses himself in a world separate from everyday life. I always think of that classic episode of “The Twilight Zone,” where Burgess Meredith wants nothing more out of life than the solitude he needs to read books in the library. (I’m sure you all remember the ironic ending.)

Michael Cohen is bookish in a different way. For him books are an extension of an active life, the means to connect his own environment and experiences to the world at large, the one we all live in. The need to connect and what we learn about the world and ourselves when we do is the theme of these fascinating explorations.

You might say that the “topic” of a Cohen essay doesn’t really matter all that much. It can be serious (capital punishment) or trivial (local restaurants). Cohen begins his essay “Men in Uniform” by describing his own attitude toward the clothing he wears. As a “typical male” he is largely indifferent. You might say at this point, “Who cares what this guy wears”? But that’s the whole point: the everyday decision is just the beginning of the inquiry. The stimulus is a book (something about ladies’ black dresses) which Cohen vividly recalls reading. And then we’re off, on a journey through the fascinating, surprising, often funny world of men’s clothing. As Cohen tells us. “one of the governing principles of male sartorial design is making inappropriate choices hard to blunder into.” Along the way we get all kinds of wonderful information: Tobacco tycoon P. J. Lorillard, imitating the Prince of Wales, brings the tuxedo to America. The men’s suit evolves from a display of the male body to concealment of it. The rise and fall (and rise and fall) of the double-breasted suit, etc. Finally we return to Michael Cohen and his clothing choices. But it’s not really about him any more. It never is, and that’s really the point.

Sometimes Cohen’s topics are obviously serious. His brilliant essay on capital punishment (“The Victims and the Furies”) couldn’t be more different from the usual “pro/con” essay. It doesn’t particularly matter whether you agree or disagree with Cohen’s position. (Why be coy? He’s against it.) Either way you will be dazzled by his fascinating arguments and the wide range of his references, from Orestes killing his mother in the Oresteia of Aeschylus to Michael Dukakis fumbling his answer to a question on CNN.

And sometimes we just get a little fun, as in his essay on the demographics of local restaurants and the pleasures of a round of his beloved game of golf.

We learn a lot about Michael Cohen from his essays. But we learn much more about the world we all live in. The final message of these informative and entertaining essays: Each of us is alone. But we’re all in this together.

– Richard Steiger, Amazon verified review

Michael Cohen’s essays on the reading life are a treat to read. Relaxed, personal, wide-ranging, they contain fascinating nuggets of information and lively assessments of hundreds of books, as well as a whole life’s worth of thoughtful rumination on time, love, travel, and family, as well as what it means to be, almost existentially, a reader.

– Christina Thompson, Editor, Harvard Review

Anyone who has pounded the pavement selling The Great Books of the Western World in 54 volumes and lived to tell gets my undying respect and should get yours. Michael Cohen is a book rat, not a book snob. For him, the pleasures of the book are tactile and auditory as well as psychological and philosophical. The essays in A Place to Read take on potential plate-lunch combinations in western Kentucky, the tuxedo as male uniform, the golf course as locus of friendship and humor, and Baptist theological responses to Day of the Dead practices in Michoacán, in addition to more strictly literary subjects.

– Ann Neelon, editor of New Madrid

I don’t know if Michael Cohen drinks Dos Equis, but if and when he does, he may qualify as one of the most interesting men in the world. Cohen is a retired English professor, amateur astronomer, small plane pilot, long time birder, golfer, world traveler, and author. He has dealt with family tragedy and daunting health issues, spent seven months leisurely reading three-thousand pages of French novelist Marcel Proust, and dined with two future Apollo astronauts. But above all he is a reader and lover of books, and therein lies the central theme of A Place to Read: Life and Books. Cohen is a keen observer who writes clearly and candidly about his experiences and at the same time he is an avid reader who does not shy away from the deeper thoughts of authors such as essayist Michel de Montaigne or E. B. White. His passion for books is evident throughout this fascinating collection of essays and I heartily recommend Cohen’s book to any self-confessed bibliophile. After reading A Place to Read, I am reminded of a passage in Annie Dillard’s book The Writing Life: “There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading—that is a good life.”

– Bob Vickers, Amazon verified review

There are books about books and even books about readers, but there are few books about reading. Michael Cohen has filled that void wonderfully, with a book of essays that in one way or another, tell about a life of reading.

Cohen’s life as essayist, professor, and keen observer of ordinary things and people are the substance of these essays, but in one way or another, each brings the reader back to the special joys of a life of loving books and reading. Each in its own way comments on the human situation, filtered through a personal optic that is at once refined and erudite. And yet, there is nothing stilted about these essays.

Every reader will come away with favorite essays from this collection – three stood out for me, mainly because they touched a personal nerve or two. What I liked most about the essays in general was how Michael Cohen artfully — or maybe just naturally — integrates life with books and books with life. Everywhere, for him, there is the synapse between experience and books read.

Michael Cohen has given us a collection of personal retrospectives that deserve a place in the finest tradition of the American essay. They are simple and direct—amusing, highly personal, and insightful. They’ll make you smile, smirk, frown, and gasp, but they’ll never bore. I promise.

– E. A. Allen, author of the Montclaire Mysteries

The act of reading is one thing, but to really love reading means sharing with others the gifts and flaws that admired writers have delivered to us across time and place. It is to interpret those writers’ attempts “to describe what is indescribable,” as E.B. White once put it, and remind us of what those writers reveal about the world and ourselves. That is the promise Michael Cohen makes to readers of his essays in A Place to Read.

Cohen, a retired literature professor, neatly ties together his personal essays with ribbons of pithy wisdom from writers he describes with familiarity and reverence, like beloved aunts and uncles he hasn’t seen in years. When summarizing the effect Proust and Montaigne had on him in the frankly-named essay, “A Retiree Reads Proust and Montaigne,” he explains, “both these writers provided me with what I was after: some self-indulgence and a good dose of the subjective.

It doesn’t matter how many of the authors a reader has met before; Cohen will introduce you to them anew. In fact, A Place to Read is most fun when the reader tries to keep up with Cohen’s literary associations. The author is in his element when linking Hamlet to the features of Moleskine notebooks by way of James Joyce and Oliver Wendell Holmes’ writing processes as in the essay, “Notebooks.” Or, in one of his strongest narratives, Cohen constructs a vision of Mexico starting with his 1965 spring break visit to a NASA tracking station in Guaymas as Gemini 3 circled the Earth. Then he somehow ends with discovering Frida Kahlo’s ashes, while along the way conjuring Mary McCarthy, Alain de Botton and Susan Sontag as if they were Mexico’s scenic lookouts, crammed megacities or rugged canyons.

In embracing this professorial voice, Cohen becomes a confident and unapologetic scholarly tour guide, showing the reader around the seemingly random but intensely personal places of his life. To your left is the Barrancas del Cobre in Mexico. Straight ahead you’ll see a roadside memorial outside Tucson. Here are the bookshelves being emptied as formerly treasured books are being sold off.

And often the places he shows us represent more than just backdrops or settings. Place bolsters the understanding of his life at particular stages and tethers him to specific states of mind. Place, then, is a metaphysical concept that streams through the essays. “I am located when I am in one of these places,” he writes of his dual homes in Tucson, Arizona, and on the Blood River in western Kentucky.

In the title essay, Cohen invites readers to question the relationship between space and the act of absorbing what books offer us:

When I think about the power of reading to transform place and the way real readers read anywhere, I can’t help but have mixed feelings about the idea of ‘reading rooms,’ places designed specifically for reading.

Cohen does stumble in the essay “Men in Uniform” when he uses outdated generalizations, presumably to amuse. Instead, they seem to jolt the reader out of the informative and thought-provoking place to read that Cohen has constructed.

Cohen begins that essay, “One of the many reasons I am glad to be male—right up there with never having to deal with menstruation and usually being able to get my carry-on out of the overhead compartment by myself—is the clothes.”

Later in “Men in Uniform,” Cohen describes the sentiments in Ilene Beckerman’s Love, Loss, and What I Wore, as “unthinkable except perhaps for gay men: straight men do not ordinarily associate their affective lives with their clothes or shoes.”

But Cohen, as any good essayist, is inviting us into his mind, his experience, his particular shade of glasses through which this retired professor, amateur pilot, compulsive reader, happy golfer, proud father, eager traveler and shrewd observer views the world.

In doing so, Cohen spends as much effort prompting readers to think about life as he does showing how great literature can inform us about the joys of flying or comprehending death or about the construction pens and the nature of names. Cohen wrestles with existential questions that confound us all without straining for answers that he doesn’t have:

… in fact the impatient skywatcher sees little of what the heavens offer. One cannot even begin to see dim objects until the eyes are dark-adapted, so the first twenty to thirty minutes under the stars have to be indirect gestures toward seeing.

At his best, Cohen treats the essays like indirect gestures toward understanding life. And that’s worth finding a place to read.

– Ryan Alessi, New Madrid

06 Aug20160

Nullarbor Song Cycle

ipoz

David P Reiter’s latest film celebrates the beauty of the Nullarbor Plain, a vast semi-arid landscape from South into Western Australia that most people try to cross as quickly as possible, if they bother to drive it at all.

Based on an acclaimed poetic sequence published in The Age Monthly, Reiter’s hybrid short film combines still and moving images, spoken word and music to waken the spirit of the place – its history, its mythology, its life forms.

You’ll never think of the Nullarbor in quite the same way.

ISBN 9781921869167 (DVD film, 30 min.)

AUD $20

USD $20

NZD $22

GBP £13

EUR €15

06 Aug20160

Hemingway in Spain

ipoz

Hemingway in Spain and Selected Poems by David P Reiter, was shortlisted for the prestigious John Bray Award in the 1998 Adelaide Festival Literary Awards.

Reiter’s work emerges out of his passion for travel, cultural history, and of course his love of language. Not easily categorised, his writing shows at once a mastery of classical form and techniques but also a playful exploitation of post-modern methods.

There are several “Hemingways” in this sequence, voices from the past and present, real and imagined, in a mode Reiter calls ‘fusion poetry’ to produce an unforgettable artistic experience.

Hemingway in Spain and Selected Poems is the fourth poetry collection from an author of international stature.

Now in its 2nd edition, it features even more of Reiter’s photographs from Spain, providing a taste of what’s in store in his DVD based on the book. The enhanced eBook, available direct from IP and on the iBookstore, contains audio readings of many of the poems.

The DVD is available in PAL and NTSC versions and for download from Amazon. The audiobook is now available from Audible.com as well as other major audiobook sites..

Take a look at the DVD film version as well.

ISBN 978187819828 (PB, 124pp); 152mm x 229mm	AUD $25	USD $18	NZD $27	GBP £12	EUR €14
ISBN 9781921869525 (eBook)	AUD $13	USD $10	NZD $15	GBP £6	EUR €7
ISBN 9781876819866 (Film 2hrs)	AUD $30	USD $25	NZD $33	GBP £17	EUR €20
ISBN 9781925231878 (Audiobook)	AUD $16	USD $10	NZD $18	GBP £8	EUR €9

Reviews

Articulate and endlessly curious, David Reiter sets no bounds to his taste for the world’s many places, people, and happenings. These poems criss-cross Spain as well as the early Hemingway’s life and texts, to create a colourful simulacrum of its invincible, fecund life and history.

— Judith Rodriguez, Deakin University

Reiter’s book bring[s] a panorama of lost worlds to the reader — from the Kremlin, to Flinder’s Breaksea Island, from Norfolk Island markets… to Idaho. They stitch you into a tapestry blending a rather fine weave, with loose threads left hanging just to trip you up if you become complacent. ‘Art does not insist. You must let the fragments/find voice and not worry so much about the gaps.’

— Bev Braune, Australian Book Review

What Reiter has done is more imaginative and more genuinely creative and ground-breaking because he has turned Spain not into a land of monuments that the poet reacts to and makes poems from but into a land of voices. Hemingway acts as a kind of guide but the voice is as likely to be that of a character from one of his novels as it is to be that of the writer. And Columbus, Charles the Fifth, Clint Eastwood, Miro, Picasso and a host of others get to speak as well. All of the themes of this ‘voco-drama’ interrelate because, as one poem says: ‘the centuries / act in circles more often than straight lines’.

— Martin Duwell, University of Queensland

Hemingway in Spain is a substantial and accomplished piece of writing which, often in the persona of Hemingway, retraces poetically many of that man’s preoccupations, as part of David Reiter’s aesthetic response to his experience of Spain (photography is also included). History and its lessons, the blood shed in its making, suffering and stoicism, religion and belief, the mystery of beauty and sex, the nature of modern life and the primal ‘truth’ (as Hemingway might put it) of ancient cultures and rituals. Pithy observations which in the confidence of their assertion carry a ring of truth evoke the big American style: Infidelity / was a squall for some, an anchor for others / candles against the uncertainties of night…Some believe it’s science / others just good luck / that we fall in love / is a superstition; that we stay together is default… ("Contrast at Cuenca").

— Nathan Hollier, Overland.152

Australia does have…a few who are masters of the poetic art… they include the great Les Murray, the splendid Phillip Salom and the challenging David P Reiter. Hemingway in Spain is the best example yet of Reiter’s experiment with what he calls fusion poetry and the story he tells in the many parts that comprise the whole offers as intriguing and insightful a perspective as any on the great, but flawed American novelist…[he] brings us that man in various forms, whether as the writer, as his greatest character from his greatest novel — Robert Jordan from For Whom The Bell Tolls — or as an observer looking back. And while taking on Hemingway is a formidable challenge, remember that in the end even Hemingway couldn’t live up to being Hemingway. Reiter is more than equal to the task.

— Michael Jacobson, Gold Coast Weekend Review

David Reiter’s most recent book is a fascinating expression of the problem of history and the emptiness of the social sphere…[the] photos exemplify what I read as the central thesis…the frustrating presence of a past that cannot be pinned down, and that offers no secure place for human subjects…this is a book which disturbs, rather than confirms, a narrative stability. Its uncertain politics, its promiscuous juxtaposing of images, times and places, and its collapsing of the fictional into the historical (and vice versa), leaves something unsettled and unexpected, but something which deserves further attention.

— Jen Webb, Idiom 23

02 Aug20160

Timelord Dreaming

ipoz

Winner, 2016 Western Australian Premier’s Award!

You wake in the middle of the night with a terrible pain radiating from your lower side up to your chest. An ambulance is called, and you’re rationed ever increasing doses of morphine on your way to the hospital. In the EW, a heart attack is ruled out but the mystery intensifies. Until a CT scan reveals the truth…

“You”, in this case, was the author, who, with the kindness of a Dr Who understudy and other medical staff at the Mater Hospital, Brisbane, survived a urgent operation and had many medicated days to reflect on an often surreal experience.

Timelord Dreaming uses “tweetems”, microtexts with Internet call-outs, to recreate one man’s journey through the parallel universes of patient and personal identity. If you’ve ever been hospitalised, you’ll find much that is familiar – and not always comfortable – here.

Dr David P Reiter won the 2012 Western Australian Premier’s Award for My Planets Reunion Memoir. Timelord Dreaming continues his innovative work in the frontier between text and digital media.

ISBN 9781925231021 (PB, 84pp); 140mm x 216mm	AUD $25	USD $18	NZD $27	GBP £12	EUR €14
ISBN 9781925231038 (eBook)	AUD $13	USD $10	NZD $15	GBP £6	EUR €7