Frederick Seidel – författare

'Seidel grips the twentieth century between his teeth like a blade as he speaks. He is one of the more formidable poets of the last third of the century.' Calvin Bedient, Poetry'He is scary, but funny, but 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 Sun'The moral thrills of his poetry can be as daunting as the moral spills, the cruel intelligence of glamour as alluring as the mystical stillness that is somewhere also at the heart of his poetry.' Adam Phillips, Raritan'The poems in Ooga-Booga are the richest yet and read like no one else's: they're surreal, utterly unpretentious, and suffused with the peculiar American loneliness of Raymond Chandler. 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 he has more in common with Philip Larkin or John Ashbery, but the fact that Seidel can prompt such a bizarre question is more revealing than any possible answer.' The New York Times Book Review

Occasional Wild Parties brings together Sam Riviere, one of the most discussed of the new generation of British poets, whose 'post-internet' poetry sees him acting now as scribe, now as DJ, taking in everything from technologized romance to celebrity culture as filtered through Kim Kardashian's make-up routine; the 'elegant ghoul' Frederick Seidel, zooming through the dark underbelly of international high society on his Ducati racing bike; and the wonderfully observant Kathryn Maris, whose work ranges with a dark wit over incomprehensible deities, wayward mothers, the politics of children's sports contests, and psychoanalysis. All three lift the lid on their corners of civilized society to show the less glittering realities that lie just beneath the surface."On the verge of perpetrating acts of artistic barbarism"I perceived a spoon as the title of a plate of food"- SAM RIVIERE, 'Mindfulness'"Deer garter-belt across our visionAnd stand there waiting for our decision."Our only decision was how to cook the venison.I am civilized butI see the silenceAnd write the words for the thought balloon."- FREDERICK SEIDEL, 'Kill Poem'"The man in the basement wrote stories about heroin.The woman in the attic read stories with heroines.The woman in the attic noticed a bruise that ran from the top to the base of her thigh.The bruise looked like Europe.The man in the basement was in love with the sister of the secretive man who loved him more.He whooped to the woman, 'You killed your student?'To himself he wept, 'I killed my father.'"- KATHRYN MARIS, 'The House with Only an Attic and a Basement'

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.

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.

This is the End of Days.This is what we've been waiting for always.I walked over to the Hudson River, heading for Mars.Each poem of mine is a suicide belt.I say that to my girlfriend Life.Peaches Goes It Alone, Frederick Seidel's newest collection of poems, begins with global warming and ends with Aphrodite. In between is everything. Peaches Goes It Alone presents the sexual and political themes that have long preoccupied Seidel - and thrilled and offended his readers. Lyrical, grotesque, and elegiac, Peaches Goes It Alone adds new music and menace to Seidel's masterful body of work.

This is the End of Days.This is what we've been waiting for always.I walked over to the Hudson River, heading for Mars.Each poem of mine is a suicide belt.I say that to my girlfriend Life.Peaches Goes It Alone, Frederick Seidel's newest collection of poems, begins with global warming and ends with Aphrodite. In between is everything. Peaches Goes It Alone presents the sexual and political themes that have long preoccupied Seidel-and thrilled and offended his readers. Lyrical, grotesque, and elegiac, Peaches Goes It Alone adds new music and menace to Seidel's masterful body of work.

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.This collection provides readers with a perpetually exciting, compact edition of the revolutionary poet's most powerful work. Frederick Seidel has been hailed as 'the poet of a new contemporary form' (New York Review of Books), and 'the most frightening American poet ever' (Boston Review). His ambitious, disturbing and tender work has mystified and captured critics, poets and readers for decades. New Selected Poems allows readers to appreciate the scope of Seidel's work over the past half-century and his uncanny ability to say the unsayable. Seidel is, in the words of the critic Adam Kirsch, 'the best American poet writing today'.

This collection provides readers with a perpetually exciting, compact edition of the revolutionary poet's most powerful work. Frederick Seidel has been hailed as 'the poet of a new contemporary form' (New York Review of Books), and 'the most frightening American poet ever' (Boston Review). His ambitious, disturbing and tender work has mystified and captured critics, poets and readers for decades. Select Seidel allows readers to appreciate the scope of Seidel's work over the past half-century and his uncanny ability to say the unsayable. Seidel is, in the words of the critic Adam Kirsch, 'the best American poet writing today'.

A bristling, invigorating new collection from the eminent American poetFrederick Seidel declares 'I'm not as old as I used to be. / I'm getting young.' In So What, he speeds across the island of Manhattan on his racetrack-only Superbike, hurtling into the tenth decade of his life and the sixth decade of his extraordinary career. But the path from youth to old age has not been straightforward. With a disarming combination of acuity and playfulness, the poet confronts his vulnerability while using his artfulness as a form of subversion. Rather than contemplating a return to childlike innocence, he writes, 'I explode with rage and age.' In doing so, he summons up a tidal surge full of shotguns and wristwatches, late-blooming love and sex, and stark glimpses of American life. At its crest stands the poet, looking over all this wreckage and creation, and he proclaims: so what.'[A]s vigorous, insightful, moving and disturbing as his work has ever been . . . We need poets' blessings, but Seidel's work has never been the place to find them. Instead, he offers something else we also need: poems that won't let us look away.' New York Times'Genuinely outrageous . . . he prizes uncomfortable truth-telling and has a blasé attitude to accepted pieties and the causing of offence. He is a poet who links his compromised life and self to history, politics and the public sphere.' TLS'So What energetically decries the spectre of death and the grinding indignities of illness and age facing the 89-year-old poet, while skewering the failures of the American empire and the west more widely . . . Seidel remains the toweringly enigmatic, ludic and at times offensive provocateur, yet his lyric abilities with image and line never lose their power' Rebecca Tamás, Guardian best recent poetry