Coda

by Steven Seidenberg

Overview

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.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632431738
Publisher:	Omnidawn Publishing, Inc.
Publication date:	11/03/2025
Pages:	124
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

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.
 

Editorial Reviews

"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

"An unnamed narrator, possibly afloat, adrift, possibly asleep, or dreaming, or already dead, or as good as, being an exile, or a condemned fool on a ship of fools, takes the opportunity of this voyage of sorts, to try and make sense of their life and mental state. Through a dizzying, meandering syntax, and farcical flourish, the adventure takes us through philosophical events with dogs, how to tell one’s tale, plead one’s case, how to walk through doors, lose one’s limbs, if not one’s mind, how to make a liveable self in the world, while puffing out smokes of language to fight off the existential crisis at play: 'I am waiting for something to wait for.' It might take a little while to adjust to this spinning language feast, adapted from bygone literary models, from Rabelais to Sterne, but once you’re in, you will find yourself unable to put down the addictive, comical, and strangely urgent twists and turns of Seidenberg’s latest proposition."

Caroline Bergvall