DC Reid’s new book of poems, You Shall Have No Other, is a daring technical and psychological achievement. The poems are manifest in four different, tangible, printed-page books, each with its own individual cover and interior images to present multiple interpretations of the same poems: war; beauty; religion; and, sex. The book asks: how do we understand the world? The tangible book also has novel conventions including character, time sequence, and point of view, following Sandria as she moves through the middle of her life dealing with abuse suffered as a child, and in creating an artificial intelligence, Cloudio, to help in her therapeutic search. Where she ends is a moral dilemma.

In addition, these poems cross media boundaries to reveal that poetry magically blooms into film because of the centrality of images and the cross-subject, associational expressions embodied in metaphor. The first ten web-based movie-poems, may be found on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/user12356094/videos. To add further meaning, Reid has written a symphonic adagio score and layered the audio and video in multiple tracks. In addition, many of the Cloudio poems encapsulate cutting-edge brain science – the ‘Software toward an aesthetic of…’ poems – about how the human brain with its billions of purposeful cells comes into being. The human/artificial brain takes 20 years to mature, and quick links take the reader behind the scenes to brain science reviewed on www.dcreid.ca.

In a universe of new media, You Shall Have No Other asks the important new question: what does a poem mean when it can be endlessly made into new and different possibilities. The technical aims of the book go even further: a PDF of the manuscript and a writeable e-version may be obtained from dcreid@islandnet.com or as a USB key or from Sandria.ca where all 78 poem-movies will be rendered. The reader has access to several gigabytes of images so he or she can rewrite the poems from their own perspective as well as infuse the work with images of their own choice. The last step in this vertical publishing concept is for the reader to send the data stream – which is already an e-book – to Amazon for print-on-demand into their own tangible printed-page book sent back to them the next day. The reader is the writer. Every book is unique.

DC Reid has published six books of poetry, one novel and four non-fiction fly-fishing titles. Two books of poetry, Love And Other Things That Hurt and The Hunger, were shortlisted, in their separate years, for the Dorothy Livesay Award, BC’s highest prize for a book of poetry. Among his many other awards, Reid has taken silver twice in the Bliss Carmen award. His work has been translated into Hindi and Spanish. He is a past President of the League of Canadian Poets. Visit dcreid.ca for something completely different, and a fascinating title: The Brains of Poets, that combines cutting-edge neuroscience and the minds of poets.

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