Steven Seidenberg and David Abel

Situ is a hesitant unfolding of demise, a text that occupies the interstices between diegetic, philosophical, and poetic discursive timbres. From this tension—which finds form in an indeterminate subject’s relationship with a bench, his anguished site of rest and motion—the subsequent flux at the center of the narrative voice facilitates a kind of epistemology of volition that both proves and parodies the necessity of the philosophical system for a narrator whose instability gives such exploration its emergent poetic urgency. In the wildly despairing and circular machinations that ensue, this attempt at “thinking thinking” moves in and out of the body of the thinker it observes, displaying a devastating picture of the paradoxes at the basis of all representation, whether willful or inadvertent, an aesthetic act or a causal order inferred through polemic and reasoned pursuit. Situ is Seidenberg’s signature style raised to the next level, an accomplishment that calls to mind the literary contributions of Blanchot, Bernhard, and pre-impasse Beckett.

STEVEN SEIDENBERG is the author of Situ (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Null Set (Spooky Actions Books, 2015), Itch (Raw Art Press, 2014), and numerous chapbooks of verse and aphorism. His collection of photographs, Pipevalve: Berlin, was released by Lodima Press in 2017. He has had solo shows of his visual work in various galleries in the U.S., Asia, and Europe. He is co-editor of the literary journal pallaksch.pallaksch. (Instance Press) and curates the False Starts reading series at The Lab in San Francisco.

Poet and editor David Abel is the proprietor of Passages Bookshop in Portland, Oregon. Two new books were released late in 2017: Selected Durations, a limited-edition, letterpress artist’s book published by the Black Rock Press at the University of Nevada, Reno, and XIV Eclipses, a book of poems from Couch Press in Portland; two others are forthcoming in 2018: Sequitur Her, from press-press-pull in Portland, and Equifinality, from Crane’s Bill in Albuquerque. A founding member of the Spare Room reading series (now in its seventeenth year), he is also an occasional curator and educator, and a consultant with the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno.