The poet hurts, his "scab is a lake where bull shark flits toward chum." In punchy, clipped poetic prose, he parses out our commonweal psychic pain, each poem a blind alley in which he must retrace his steps to get to the next imagistic manifesto. As always, Seidman is a master of lacerating catalogues, each noun the flick-lash of a whip, regicide the endgame.