Widening Income Inequality

2017 | Essays

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.

Frederick Seidel (Author)