The narrator of Anon opens the sluice gates of embittered confession and philosophical reproach to release a flood of extravagant lyricism. These poems at first submerge readers in the ecstatic rhythms of its music, then they turn to address the tropes of narrative, inviting readers to join in pursuit of major themes of the human condition.
Steven Seidenberg employs a characteristically aphoristic style to manage multiple lines of inquiry at once. The resultant fragments navigate between testament and treatise, storyline and system, and in a manner that echoes the speculative vehemence of Samuel Beckett, Clarice Lispector, and Maurice Blanchot.
Steven Seidenberg employs a characteristically aphoristic style to manage multiple lines of inquiry at once. The resultant fragments navigate between testament and treatise, storyline and system, and in a manner that echoes the speculative vehemence of Samuel Beckett, Clarice Lispector, and Maurice Blanchot.
Praise for Anon
Marvelously at sea in swells of voluptuous language, this narrative unravels itself faster than the narrator can weave it, leaving in its wake a great momentum that keeps identity fluid across a shifting scape of ever-changing ocean. Anon draws on both senses of the word; the I that tries to tell us its story dissolves into its very telling while eternally deferring its landing. Seidenberg’s command of language is astonishing, building up into great orchestral swells that carry us along in the sheer beauty of their sound—it’s a tour de force of linguistic imagination. —Cole Swensen, author of Art in Time This is a philosophical meditation on sensation, being, and discontentment, on the ways that the “flesh is rent in twain by such a biding paragon of super fluent longings.” What purpose has a “depthless whorl of poesy” to what is lost, to what is left behind? There is a music in the intriguing sonic interrogation/investigation of thought and its forms and formal restraints. To enter Seidenberg’s text is to confront the impossibilities of holding all of being’s and sensation’s and experience’s complexities in a single phrase or word or line of thought. There remains only the trace elements of experience that we are just able to sense in the linguistic constellations Seidenberg constructs. Relational possibilities are activated through a remarkable linguistic acuity. This is a tracking of thought, of the possibilities of thought across time, of the limitations of knowing, of the “integral abyss” of the self. It is a marvelous wonder. Fall in. Fall headlong in. —Tonya M. Foster, Poet, George & Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University On these aphoristic seas made of “nothing but words” we sail on vast lexicons of maritime lore. From Ahab’s bitter conquest to Noah’s weathered flood, Anon musters “the allegory out of which this repetition issues, as a dreamer stepping into the miasma of the dream…”, each dense aphorism a verbiage ocean or island “describing the presence of an absence”; each imperilled mandate to divergence another “telling by revealing the perversity of the told.” Seidenberg’s recursive, lyrical explorations of time and narrative, knowledge and beauty, float through an archipelago of “lapidary prosody,” an ever more insistent “interregnum of ellipses,” part Melville, part Wittgenstein, part Kant, until the narrator’s ecstatic realization—“Memory is taken back and given by the ocean…; gleaners such as you and I, are alone enjoined to make a survey of the wreckage, and fashion what remains into…” Anon is that survey and that fashioning, all to submerge its readers in this shimmering sea mirage, in which we luxuriate while we plumb the mysteries of the abyss. —Susan Gevirtz, author of Hotel abc |