So What

Praise for Frederick Seidel:

"Thank God for Fred Seidel." —Michael Hofmann

"Seidel is not writing about anything as conasoling as moral muddles; he is writing about how life collapses the moral distinctions we make in order to live it.” —Adam Phillips, author of On Giving Up

"He’s the Dark Prince of American poetry, a writer of glittering malice, one who cuts against the grain of almost every variety of community feeling. He’s not a poet for everyone, but no poet worth anything is . . . Meticulous and sublime." —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Frederick Seidel, for fifty years and across ten collections, has been writing our most serious, beautiful, and essential poems, poems that are shocking in their art and astonishing in their truth, and that remind us, in their forms, why poetry was once a vital part of cultural life.” —Wyatt Mason, Harper's Magazine

“[Seidel] grips the twentieth century between his teeth like a blade as he speaks . . . One of the more formidable poets of the last third of the century.” —Calvin Bedient, Poetry

“There had never been a poet like this one before: the poet of a new contemporary form, a highlight reel—one spectacular feat after another, with all the humdrum stuff spliced out.” —Dan Chiasson, The New York Review of Books 

“One of the greatest lyrical performers of selfhood in English-language literature.” —Jonathon Sturgeon, Flavorwire

“He radiates heat. It is apparent that he has asked himself frightful questions and has not dodged the implications of their equally frightful answers . . . A master of metaphor.” —Louise Bogan, The New Yorker

“Beguiling and magisterial.” —Joel Brouwer, The New York Times Book Review

“Profoundly beautiful . . . The writer willing to say the unsayable.” —Philip Connors, n+1

“One of the world's most inspired and unusual poets . . . His poems are a triumph of cosmic awe in the face of earthly terror.” —Hillel Italie, USA Today

“In all his work, Seidel remains a larger than life figure, full of vice, menace, and power, and capable of uttering the most shocking thoughts. He writes with the same risky power as John Berryman and Sylvia Plath in their confessional poems. Berryman, however, wrote of his inner torments by inventing a surrogate named Henry, while Plath incarnated herself in a series of voracious, quasi-mythical speakers. Seidel, by writing under his own name yet predicating such impossible and scandalous things of himself, raises the stakes of confessional poetry to a new level . . . He remains, even now, a poet of wonderful fearlessness and daring, and he deserves to be remembered as the transgressive adventurer he is.'” —Adam Kirsch, Tablet Magazine

"In American poetry today there is no one with Frederick Seidel's sheer ambition, comprehensive sense of our times, sophistication, nerve, and skill." —Lawrence Joseph, The Nation