Desert Song: Poems

A bold and musical new collection from the great “laureate of the louche” (The New York Times Magazine).

“I want to talk / I want to talk it through” says the poet from his perch. Frederick Seidel’s Desert Song is a kind of fugue, one animated by the subjects that possess a singular vision. In these poems of passion, refinement, and ferocity, Seidel sidles down the streets of rhyme again, mixing memory and desire.

“Here is power that strikes,” said Robert Lowell of Final Solutions, Seidel’s first collection. In this, his twentieth, he has struck once again, confronting the trials of age with rage, fear, and irresistible wit. Zap!