Ooga-Booga

Seidel's 14th book finds his caustic vigor undiminished, his high-volume confidence as entertaining—or disturbing—as ever: gleeful antiwar protests and self-mocking, obvious rhymes zip easily among a bombed Baghdad, a deluxe version of Paris and a hyperbolically glitzy jetset New York. The volume's emotions swing, too, between the aging poet's obsession with death and his adjacent obsession with sexual prowess: "I spend most of my time not dying./... / I climb on a woman I love./ I repeat my themes," he announces. Many of the poems aspire at once to shock us and to sound blithely assured, with utterances no other poet would think to—nor perhaps want to—set down: "The vagina-eyed Modigliani nude/ Made me lewd," for example. Seidel (The Cosmos Trilogy , 2003) perhaps satirizes a Western capitalism in which no one can be rich enough, fast enough or man enough to satisfy his own ideals. Yet for every reader who finds brilliant, social critique, there may be another who wonders if it's all a joke. (Nov.)