Coda, by Steven Seidenberg, read by the author (Omnidawn, 2025)

Coda, by Steven Seidenberg, read by the author (Omnidawn, 2025)

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.