Seidel has been writing about the dark side of Euro-American richesse—murder, mayhem and California—since the Eisenhower Era. The last two years have seen the release of The Cosmos Poems
and Life on Earth, parts of a trilogy slowly zooming in on Manhattan (the area code in question) from space. His project here might be best thought of as attempted shock therapy for the island's richest 1%; most of these poems take place in that milieu and are literally addressed to that audience: the poems collected here were commissioned by and first appeared in the Wall Street Journal's Leisure and Arts page. From the opening "I Do" ("I do pablum. I do doo-doo. I do heroic deeds.") we move to "Dido with Dildo" ("She stood on her toes to kiss me./ Like in the nineteen fifties./ I glued my mucho macho lips to destiny.") and through to "The War of the Worlds," where visitors are "taking photographs/ Of ground zero—of Allah akbar in formaldehyde in a jar./ God is great. Love is hate." These and the other 30 poems here are coldblooded recitations of postures toward, feelings about and descriptions of a world in love with itself and with money and violence—as reflected in the speaker, who reveals details about "Fred Seidel" in previous books, but here confines himself to "go[ing] public with this/ Beautiful big breasts and a penis/ Military-industrial complex." It's a complicated ruse—humanism masquerading as shallowness and nihilism—and one that the poems cannot quite maintain. The intended targets will not recognize themselves in these intentionally gross caricatures, little more than a form of elegantly voyeuristic violence. (Nov.)
