Area Code 212

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY SEP 23, 2002

Seidel has been writing about the dark side of Euro-American richesse murder, mayhem and California since the Eisenhower Era. The last two years have seen the release of The Cosmos Poems and Life on Earth, parts of a trilogy slowly zooming in on Manhattan (the area code in question) from space. His project here might be best thought of as attempted shock therapy for the island's richest 1%; most of these poems take place in that milieu and are literally addressed to that audience: the poems collected here were commissioned by and first appeared in the Wall Street Journal's Leisure and Arts page. From the opening "I Do" ("I do pablum. I do doo-doo. I do heroic deeds.") we move to "Dido with Dildo" ("She stood on her toes to kiss me./ Like in the nineteen fifties./ I glued my mucho macho lips to destiny.") and through to "The War of the Worlds," where visitors are "taking photographs/ Of ground zero of Allah akbar in formaldehyde in a jar./ God is great. Love is hate." These and the other 30 poems here are coldblooded recitations of postures toward, feelings about and descriptions of a world in love with itself and with money and violence as reflected in the speaker, who reveals details about "Fred Seidel" in previous books, but here confines himself to "go public with this/ Beautiful big breasts and a penis/ Military-industrial complex." It's a complicated ruse humanism masquerading as shallowness and nihilism and one that the poems cannot quite maintain. The intended targets will not recognize themselves in these intentionally gross caricatures, little more than a form of elegantly voyeuristic violence.