the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His collection, The Cosmos Poems, was commissioned by the American Museum of Natural History to celebrate the opening of the new Hayden Planetarium in 2000, and he won the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry in 2002. His collection Ooga-Booga was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was shortlisted for the 2007 International Griffin Poetry Prize. A limited run of his collection of new verse, Evening Man was published in 2008. The following year saw the publication of the career-spanning anthology Poems: 1959–2009. In 2016, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published his sixteenth and most recent collection of poems, Widening Income Equality. One of the poems in this collection, "The Ballad of Ferguson, Missouri," a response to the police shooting of teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, that was originally published in the November 25, 2014 edition of The Paris Review, sparked controversy online and on social media. That same year, Seidel received The Paris Review's Hadada Award, given for "a distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature." Style In response to the publication of his Collected Poems, The New York Times Magazine'''s Wyatt Mason wrote a long piece on the poet, titled "Laureate of the Louche". New York Times book reviewer David Orr, in his review of Poems: 1959-2009, wrote, "[Seidel is] one of poetry's few scary characters." Seidel is frequently characterized as such, in part because in his writing he often makes use of violent and disturbing sexual imagery and presents himself as a rather unlikeable aesthete who embraces his own "elite" brand of materialism (extolling, for instance, his love of Ducati motorcycles and handmade shoes). However, Seidel often ironizes this persona, pushing it to cartoonish extremes. Seidel's poetry comprises more than his outrageous poetic persona. He also writes poems that comment on contemporary events and are political/satirical (as is his poem "Bush's War"). His work is also notable in that he frequently makes use of rhyme and meter (both regular and irregular), including nursery rhyme-influenced references, repetitions and rhythms. One of Seidel's earliest influences was Robert Lowell. Seidel has stated, "The influence of Lowell [on my first book Final Solutions was] unmistakable." However, the critic Richard Poirier noted that Seidel had broken free of this influence by the time he published his second book, Sunrise. Bibliography Poetry Final Solutions (New York: