So What: Poems

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.