Frederick Seidel Selected Poems
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This selected, spanning half a century, demonstrates that Seidel's renegade candor has only sharpened with age. With an erudite lexicon, staccato and ambling vignettes, and a frequently debonair tone, Seidel's poems combine the sensibilities of the Greatest Generation and the Beats. They document a lust for life through a blunt and sensual dreamscape punctuated by labyrinthine conceits. The speaker's carnal appetite is balanced with Romantic sentiments, "Your eyes gazed/ Sparkling and dark as hooves,/ They had seen you through languor and error./ They were so still. They were a child./ They were wet like hours/ And hours of cold rain." Elsewhere, lust is intertwined with subservient reverence and theatrics: "You look like a field of flowers./ You look like flowers in a vase./ You look like brains and breasts./ You act like life stabbing death to death." This book offers a slice of Seidel's life: the amorous, the dark, the indulgent, and the restless mind captured by a master of craft.
