As I always do when "on holiday," I took along a big stack of poetry books to read. It's a totally indulgent list -- I expected to love them all. A couple are books I've been in the middle of for a long time & don't want ever to end: Lyn Hejinian's The Fatalist and Rachel Blau DuPlessis' Drafts 1-38: Toll. Others are books that I'm rereading: Louis Zukofsky's "A"-22-23 in its original Viking Compass / Cape Editions volume, Graham Foust's first book, As in Every Deafness (trying to resolve how I feel about its many, many heroin references), plus Peter Gizzi's Some Values of Landscape and Weather.
One volume is a book I started over 12 years ago on a similar vacation, that one up to Twin Lakes in the Sierra in California just before my own twins were born: John Ashbery's Flow Chart. Krishna was quite pregnant with the boys at that point, so not all that mobile, which meant that we sat around the rather de shabile cabin reading a lot, wonder just what parenting would bring. A month later, she was on bed rest & the births of the boys disrupted everything, including my reading of that book. It's taken me this long to start over.
But the rest are new to me completely, even if their authors are for the most part familiar. These books include:
- David Perry, New Years
- Joanne Kyger, God Never Dies
- Jeanne Heuving, Incapacity
- Richard Roundy, The Other Kind of Vertigo
- Tomaž Šalamun, Poker
- Elzabeth Willis, Meteoric Flowers
- Aaron McCollough, Welkin
- Robyn Schiff, Worth
- Fanny Howe, On the Ground
- Bob Perelman & Francie Shaw, Playing Bodies
