Coda - by Steven Seidenberg (Paperback)

About the Book

"The nameless narrator of Steven Seidenberg's latest work, Coda, attempts to trace the origins of linguistic and perceptual differentiation-of experience through the cipher of the subject, broadly understood-by advancing the linguistic experiments of contemporary lyric and narrative forms, moving between extravagant prosody and obsessive disquisition to reconfigure the conceptual imperatives common to many throughlines in philosophy and theology. Continuing the focus on the structure of memory and the decadence of body he began in his book Anon, Seidenberg here describes the epistemological regress of desire, intention, knowledge, and discernment, coupling the language and concerns of authors as diverse as Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Wittgenstein with a raucous humor in the tradition of Rabelais, Beckett, Lispector, and Sterne"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

Experimental lyric and narrative poetry that brings together philosophy, theology, and humor.

The nameless narrator of Coda attempts to trace the origins of linguistic and perceptual differentiation by experimenting with contemporary lyric and narrative forms. Moving between extravagant prosody and obsessive disquisition, Seidenberg's poetry works to reconfigure conceptual imperatives found throughout philosophy and theology. With a focus on the structure of memory and the decadence of the body, Seidenberg describes the epistemological regress of desire, intention, knowledge, and discernment.

Seidenberg brings together the language and concerns of figures including Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Wittgenstein, alongside elements of raucous humor drawn from the tradition of Rabelais, Beckett, Lispector, and Sterne.

Review Quotes

--Caroline Bergvall, author of "Drift," "Alisoun Sings," and "Middle English"

"In his captivating Coda, Seidenberg combines philosophy, narrative, and poetry to grapple with the ontological basis of perceptual multiplicity, the universal posture of a subjectivity unanchored in substance. Readers of Coda encounter an 'I' struggling against a sea of recollections, but neither in the mode of a heroic odyssey that sets its teleology on a mythic home, nor a mystical union with the One, guided by a leeward yearning for autobiographical shores. The sea is here a figure of travail and a motion that wrests the writer from stable 'ground' to an epistemological cataract, a compulsive skirr towards being that is at once a glimmer of disclosure and a final obfuscation--'the last place, the final placement, and the spent world in tranquility and rancor, ' a dream we call place. Coda is ultimately a story of beginnings without origin, and endings that digress beyond all possible conclusion; in ecstatic derivation and surrender to this paradox at the center of all psychological and philosophical resolve, Seidenberg has created a genre-defying work that transfigures the pre-modern forms of fable, treatise, panegyric, and novel into something entirely new, a tragic/comic mashup that extends beyond description."
--Tarek Elhaik, author of "Anthropology and Aesthetics: Cogitations" and "The Incurable Image"

About the Author

Steven Seidenberg is a writer and artist based in San Francisco. He is the author of Anon, plain sight, Situ, Null Set, Itch, numerous chapbooks, and two collections of photographs: Architecture of Silence: Abandoned Lives of the Italian South and Pipevalve: Berlin.