The best American poet writing today*

The title itself–a parody of a threat, something the monster under the bed might grunt–manages to capture the weird dialectic of Mr. Seidel’s 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 Seidel’s. –*Adam Kirsch, The New York Sun

The poems in Ooga-Booga are [Seidel’s] richest yet and read like no one else’s: They’re 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 he’s 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 York magazine

[Ooga-Booga is] as beguiling and magisterial as anything [Seidel] has written. I can’t 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