An overview of Frederick Seidel's best and most famous poetry from the past five decades, showing the evolution of a master poet’s craft Frederick Seidel has been hailed as "the poet of a new contemporary form" (Dan Chiasson, The New York Review of Books) and "the most frightening American poet ever" (Calvin Bedient, Boston Review ). The poems in Frederick Seidel Selected Poems span more than five decades and provide readers with some of Seidel's most powerful work. Frederick Seidel is, in the words of the critic Adam Kirsch, "the best American poet writing today."

My Tokyo , Frederick Seidel's fourth collection, brings together twenty-seven new poems by one of our most arresting writers. In Seidel's work, a passionate, uncompromising sensibility confronts the intractable reality of a turbulent world, a world of seductive glamour, harsh splendor, and cruelty. The strong rhetoric of the poems juxtaposes intense lyricism with a remorseless, cold-eyed skepticism. The results are consistently challenging, disturbing, and fiercely beautiful. Robert Lowell once wrote about this remarkable poet: "When I read him, I have envious, delighted, jolted feelings, and suspect the possibilities of modern poetry have been changed. Here is power that strikes".