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.

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, author of Drift, Alisoun Sings, and Meddle English