Seidel is the great controversialist of American poetry. Dubbed a'transgressive adventurer,' a'demonic gentleman,' a'triumphant outsider,' a'great poet of innocence,' and'an example of the dangerous Male of the Species', his sly, witty and wide-eyed poems seem earnest one moment and flippant the next, and will see him rotating his caustic fire from high-society cocktail parties to street-level poverty, genocide to Obamacare, New York to Syria. He's never more than a turn-line from humour, and it is often when he is at his funniest that he is also at his most shocking.The Independent said of his last collection:'There is no contemporary poet writing in English as witty, as shrewd, as touching and as debonair as Frederick Seidel. That's a lot of praise, but he surely merits it.'Widening Income Inequality, Seidel's new collection, is a rhymed magnificence of sexual, historical, and cultural exuberance. Rarely has poetry been this dapper, or this dire, or this true.

Frederick Seidel was born in St Louis and lives in New York City. His previous books of poems include Final Solutions, Sunrise, These Days, Poems 1959-1979, My Tokyo, Going Fast, The Cosmos Poems, Life on Earth, Area Code 212, The Cosmos Trilogy and Selected Poems. His most recent collection was Nice Weather (2013). He received the PEN/Voelker Award for Poetry in 2002.