Great Regulars: The huge risk that [Frederick] Seidel takes

is to trust the reader to be able to sense the double meaning in that declaration. Seidel is "hopeless" in the sense of incorrigible, a provocateur who, like Baudelaire, dares us to behold evil and horror and find it compelling. Yet he also allows us to see, again like Baudelaire, that only a genuinely hopeless man would find his own image so accurately reflected in scenes of evil and horror. If sin means being cut off--from other people, from God, from oneself--then no poet has found more effective symbols of the sinner's plight than Seidel, in a poem like "Contents Under Pressure":

from Adam Kirsch: Nextbook: The Reader: Mr. Delicious

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