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.

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.