Ooga-Booga: Poems

"The best American poet writing today"*nbsp; nbsp; The title itselfa parody of a threat, something the monster under the bed might gruntmanages 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 inOoga-Boogaare [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 Yorkmagazine [Ooga-Boogais] 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