Ooga-Booga

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. Seidel''s 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 Seidel''s. —*Adam Kirsch The New York SunThe poems in Ooga-Booga are [Seidel''s] richest yet and read like no one else''s: They''re 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 he''s 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 can''t 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