Anon

Steven Seidenberg is a writer and artist based in San Francisco. He is the author of plain sight, Situ, Null Set, Itch, numerous chapbooks of poetry and aphorism, and of Pipevalve: Berlin, a collection of his photographs.

“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 imperiled 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.”