one book

tagged from jessica, sorry to be a spoil sport, but one book? my brain simply does not work in singularities. so instead i'll list five books that are currently on my mind...

• alice notley, incidentals in the day world - next in my notley project, since i've now finished phoebe light and hope to be posting about that later today.
  
• diane diprima, selected poems 1956-1975 - been dipping in and out of this one for quite a while, and again recently in anticipation that she may be reading in DC in the fall. it's a big but important and pretty neglected body of work near as i can tell...
  
• david meltzer, david's copy: selected poems - interesting to compare with diprima, a near contemporary equally invested in mythopoesis and alternative knowledge systems. my first thought on flipping through this one was that it was good to have a tightly-edited selected meltzer in print after the liquidation of black sparrow; my second thought halfway through a closer read is that while there's some of meltzer's work that i really like (e.g. the second half of arrows, his early black sparrow selected), there's a fair bit that doesn't work for me. male mytho-erotopoesis of a certain vintage defaults to cliché for me.

and two from my wishlist:

• stephen kinzer, overthrow: america's century of regime change from hawaii to iraq - robert sherrill calls this one "an infuriating recitation of our government's military bullying over the past 110 years -- a century of interventions around the world that resulted in the overthrow of 14 governments -- in Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, Chile, Iran, Grenada, Afghanistan, and ... Iraq." i know a little about some of these but nothing about others: a necessary primer in democracy-building, american style.
  
• robert fisk, the great war for civilisation: the conquest of the middle east - not sure whether i could make it alltheway thru this 1100-page tome, but there's no one i'd rather read on the matter right now.