Widening Income Inequality

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.<br><br>The <i>Independent</i> 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.'<br><br><i>Widening Income Inequality</i> 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.