Ooga-Booga: Poems

The best American poet writing today* . The title itself―a parody of a threat something the monster under the bed might grunt―manages to capture the weird dialectic of Mr. Seidels black comedy: He is scary but funny but still scary . . . You would have go back to confessional masters like Lowell and Berryman to find poetry as daringly self-revealing as risky and compelling as the best of Frederick Seidels. ―*Adam Kirsch The New York Sun. The poems in Ooga-Booga are [Seidels] richest yet and read like no one elses: Theyre surreal without being especially difficult and utterly unpretentious suffused with the peculiar American loneliness of Raymond Chandler . . . [The poem ‘Barbados] is the loveliest Seidel has written to date and hes perfected the subtle rhythms and rhymes that rocket the stanzas forward like his Ducati 916 SPS. While I can think of a more likable book of poems I can scarcely imagine a better one. ―Alex Halberstadt New York magazine. [Ooga-Booga is] as beguiling and magisterial as anything [Seidel] has written. I cant decide whether Seidel has more in common with Philip Larkin or John Ashbery but the fact that he can prompt such a bizarre question is more revealing than any possible answer. ―Joel Brouwer The New York Times Book Review