A vibrant, energizing new collection from the renowned American poet Frederick Seidel proclaims, 'I'm not as old as I used to be. / I'm getting younger.' In So What, he races across the island of Manhattan on his race-track-only Superbike, entering the tenth decade of his life and the sixth decade of his extraordinary career.

But the journey from youth to old age has not been simple. With a charming combination of sharpness and playfulness, the poet confronts his vulnerability while using his craft as a form of subversion. Rather than contemplating a return to childhood innocence, he writes, 'I explode with rage and age.' In doing so, he conjures a tidal wave filled with shotguns and wristwatches, late-blooming love and sex, and stark glimpses of American life.

At its peak stands the poet, surveying all this destruction and creation, and he declares: so what.

'[A]s vigorous, insightful, moving and unsettling as his work has ever been ... We need poets' blessings, but Seidel's work has never been the place to find them. Instead, he offers something else we also need: poems that won't let us look away.' New York Times

'Genuinely provocative ... he values uncomfortable truth-telling and has a nonchalant attitude towards accepted pieties and offending others. He is a poet who connects his compromised life and self to history, politics, and the public sphere.' TLS

'So What actively denounces the specter of death and the relentless indignities of illness and aging facing the 89-year-old poet, while criticizing the failures of the American empire and the West more broadly ... Seidel remains the towering, enigmatic, playful and sometimes offensive provocateur, yet his lyrical skills with image and line never lose their power.' Rebecca Tamás, Guardian

Pages: 152, Dimensions: 12.9x12.9cm