This is the book that politicized me. It is a book length poem combining autobiography with an expose of the 1965 Indonesian massacre. (Over two million people died in that conflict which was fueled by U.S. training and funding of a military coup.) I came to this book for the poetry, and stayed for the politics. The political content is, unfortunately, very difficult. It's full of references that I, at least, had a really hard time following the first time I read the book, and which are presented in a very dense manner. The poetry itself, however, is wonderful, and not at all difficult (except when it tries to cram too much political/historical content into too few lines) and is the main reason why I'm recommending the book. The hardest thing about it is that it's written in a free style without punctuation that sometimes makes it hard to connect subjects and verbs, or to separate one sentence from another. (I recommend trying to read it aloud and not trying too hard at first to parse every phrase correctly. I think this will help to bring out the sense in the words.) The poetry moves with an understated ease, like the feet of the stewardess near the beginning of the poem, as "I look down without nausea/on the invisible peaks/the stewardess is walking over/as if minutes not sweaty years/separated them all". He looks down from the window of the plane in the direction of the peaks he knows are there beneath the clouds, the peaks the stewardess is actually walking over, since she is walking inside the plane and the plane is flying over the peaks. And for the skywalking stewardess, it is in fact only minutes that separate the peaks; she has no idea of the "sweaty years" the author associates with them. It is a wonderful thing to me, how much Scott puts so casually, so easily, into a few simple lines.