Peaches Goes It Alone

August 1, 2018

This collection from the 82-year-old Seidel (Ooga-Booga) features an elderly narrator worrying about his future and sexual prowess. He disbelieves in God and wonders whether God disbelieves in him. He looks in a mirror and becomes depressed. He visits New York, Paris, Amsterdam, and Chernobyl--and thinks of terrorism, suicide bombers, fog, rain, and (how much he hates) President Trump. Filled with word play, irony, and rage, these language poems are dark and discordant, as can be seen in lines like these: "Each poem of mine is a suicide belt/ And I explode into a pink pate sticking to the street." Seidel fuels his poetry with alliteration and rhyme and uses both to take his poems willy-nilly wherever the words lead, as with the climatic final piece, which, referencing the title, suggests that Peaches goes it alone like Prufrock in T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." VERDICT What these poems lack in depth they try to make up for in anger. Sometimes that works, but more often it doesn't. Recommended for academic libraries only.--C. Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2018
Ever-divisive octogenarian Seidel (Widening Income Inequality) continues to move through the world with the ease of a man of privilege who has been blessed with an enthusiastic mind, all of which is brightly reflected in his latest collection. Seidel has been criticized for the way he depicts women in his work, an accusation he sidesteps with such lines as “Ninety percent of a man like me is mouth,/ Exhorting on the page.” Yet he can’t help but observe with an off-rhyme, “The girl with the face/ As charming as her voice/ Has a beautiful ass/ Filling out her tan pants.” Seidel often references current events; here colorfully describing the Trump administration as “a dictatorship of vicious spineless slimes” and Trump’s infamous New York residence as “a tower of global-warming gold.” The poems flit from the City of Light to Amsterdam’s red light district, and off to “Barbados, Ghana, the Hôtel Raphael, the Hôtel Lenox,/ Les Gourcuff, snowy Sag Harbor.” But the collection’s leading role remains New York City, a place that accompanies Seidel even as he grapples with mortality: “My God, what a beautiful New York day!/ If only getting old would go away!” Throughout, Seidel shows that as one ages, “One goes on living and wonderful things/ Go on going wrong.”

October 15, 2018
Prolific poet Seidel (Widening Income Inequality, 2016) returns with another collection of extremely timely poems (#MeToo and Trump pop up numerous times) that are nevertheless defined by his signature rhyming couplets ("I can't stop rhyming!"). Seidel applies his trademark technique to silly quips ("American art used to be risky. / American art used to be frisky") and occasional profundity ("Reader, when I have long since ceased to exist, / I will be looking at you while you read this"), but often his most effective use of these schemes doesn't involve end rhymes at all. "Hymn to Aphrodite" concludes with a beautiful, burning image of the goddess: "Eyes white and blank with blind / Ecstatic lack of sight." Other poems traverse habitual subject matter?his life in New York City and evaporating virility?while Seidel takes greater liberties with the personas he adopts ("Illegals like myself" and "I wear a suicide belt"). As always, Seidel's wry, ironic wit transforms a topic as serious as war crimes in "Generalissimo Francisco Franco Is Still Dead" into mischievous commentary: "Make Spain great again!"(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)