Frederick Seidel Selected Poems

An overview of Frederick Seidel's best and most famous poetry from the past five decades, showing the evolution of a master poet’s craft Frederick Seidel has been hailed as "the poet of a new contemporary form" (Dan Chiasson, The New York Review of Books) and "the most frightening American poet ever" (Calvin Bedient, Boston Review). The poems in Frederick Seidel Selected Poems span more than five decades and provide readers with some of Seidel's most powerful work. Frederick Seidel is, in the words of the critic Adam Kirsch, "the best American poet writing today."

These are the collected poems of a master whose work includes many of the most compelling, savage, and tender poems in the language. Frederick Seidel is, in the words of the critic Adam Kirsch, "the best American poet writing today."

This collection provides readers with a perpetually exciting, compact edition of the revolutionary poet's most powerful work. Frederick Seidel has been hailed as 'the poet of a new contemporary form' (New York Review of Books), and 'the most frightening American poet ever' (Boston Review). His ambitious, disturbing and tender work has mystified and captured critics, poets and readers for decades. Select Seidel allows readers to appreciate the scope of Seidel's work over the past half-century and his uncanny ability to say the unsayable. Seidel is, in the words of the critic Adam Kirsch, 'the best American poet writing today'.

From the winner of the PEN/Voelker Award, poems of love, terror, rage, and desire. Here I am, not a practical man, But clear-eyed in my contact lenses, Following no doubt a slightly different line than the others, Seeking sexual pleasure above all else, Despairing of art and of life, Seeking protection from death by seeking it On a racebike, finding release and belief on two wheels . . . --from "The Death of the Shah" The poems in Ooga-Booga are about a youthful slave owner and his aging slave, and both are the same man. This is the tenderest, most savage collection yet from Frederick Seidel, "the most frightening American poet ever" (Calvin Bedient, Boston Review).

This new selection of the poetry of Frederick Seidel celebrates the career of an American original.

Seidel is the great controversialist of American poetry. Dubbed a 'transgressive adventurer,' a 'demonic gentleman,' a 'triumphant outsider,' a 'great poet of innocence,' and 'an example of the dangerous Male of the Species', his sly, witty and wide-eyed poems seem earnest one moment and flippant the next, and will see him rotating his caustic fire from high-society cocktail parties to street-level poverty, genocide to Obamacare, New York to Syria. He's never more than a turn-line from humour, and it is often when he is at his funniest that he is also at his most shocking. The Independent said of his last collection: 'There is no contemporary poet writing in English as witty, as shrewd, as touching and as debonair as Frederick Seidel. That's a lot of praise, but he surely merits it.' Widening Income Inequality, Seidel's new collection, is a rhymed magnificence of sexual, historical, and cultural exuberance. Rarely has poetry been this dapper, or this dire, or this true.

The Cosmos Poems is about the universe: who it is, how it is, how it came to be, what is going to happen; when, why, who you are; what there was before it was; the smallness and the vastness, as told by a child to a child, in which quantum mechanics makes friends with special relativity forever. Frederick Seidel's poems tell the story.

‘A playwright of world stature’—Mario Relich, Wasafiri Final Solutions is one of Mahesh Dattani's most renowned and widely performed plays. Moving between the Partition of India and the present day, it explores issues of religious bigotry and communal violence. One night, after being chased by a murderous mob, two Muslim boys seek shelter in the home of a Hindu Gujarati family. The boys' arrival unleashes a flood of bitter memories and deep-seated prejudices. And as the tension builds towards a powerful climax, the play becomes a timely reminder of the need for tolerance. ‘At last we have a playwright who gives sixty million English-speaking Indians an identity’—Alyque Padamsee ‘Powerful and disturbing’—The New York Times