So What

A bristling, beautiful new collection from "the Dark Prince of American Poetry" (Dwight Garner, The New York Times. ). In So What. , Frederick Seidel writes of speeding his racetrack-only Superbike across the island of Manhattan, "illegal river to river, wap wap wap. WOW. " The poet hurtles toward the tenth decade of his life and into the sixth decade of his lightning-rod career, but the path from youth to old age is not a straight one. Throughout this book, Seidel smashes the boundaries of youth and age against each other and stirs up a surge of shotguns and wristwatches, late-blooming love and sex, and flashes of the naked face of American life. At its crest stands the poet, looking over the wreckage and creation, and he proclaims: so what.