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Interested reviewers and publicity inquiries: Contact John Madera at Rhizomatic.
Behold: a body, mind, and voice situated in place, in time and space—moving, moved, and immovable. Steven Seidenberg’s SITU is a hesitant unfolding of demise, a text occupying the interstices between diegesis, philosophy, and poetry. The narrative’s tension finds form in an indeterminate subject’s relationship with a bench: an anguished site of rest and motion. Proving and parodying an epistemology of volition, the unstable narrator imbues their wildly despairing circumlocutions with great poetic urgency. This “thinking thinking” moves in and out of the thinking body it observes, displaying a devastating portrait of the paradoxes at the basis of all willful or inadvertent representation. Situ is a dramatic intensification of Seidenberg’s career-long blurring of fiction, poetry, and philosophy—an accomplishment recalling the literary contributions of Blanchot, Bernhard, and pre-impasse Beckett.
Preorders for Situ are now available at Small Press Distribution. A limited number of copies will be for sale from Black Sun Lit at the 2018 AWP Conference & Bookfair in Tampa, FL, March 7–10, at table T1921.
Advance praise for Situ:
“To engage with the narrative flow of Steven Seidenberg’s Situ is to pass through the looking glass of consciousness into a seriocomic world of ‘mnemonic throes’ and ‘the null of place.'”
—Michael Palmer, author of The Laughter of the Sphinx
“Steven Seidenberg has confected a stanza out of trains of thought that falter as explanation turns on itself too many times to grasp. Situ is the fruit of the philosophical quest: a horror of the body—’face flush with the rancid muck that covers his cadaver’—and the rational mind in its infinite regress.”
—Robert Glück, author of Jack the Modernist
“A feat of extreme smarts, folding in iterative density and intense decay, Situ does philosophy as labyrinthine lit. Its intestinal yet Latinate formalism, its agonistic wit and ruinous wonder, its keen bent for passivity, would make Beckett chortle, Husserl mull, Descartes nod, Spinoza correspond, Melville wax fanciful. An original, gutsy book.”
—Mina Pam Dick, author of Delinquent
Visit the Situ page for additional product details, reviews, excerpts, and purchasing information.