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PLAIN SIGHT

by Steven Seidenberg

The text of plain sight relentlessly questions notions of thinking and being, setting out various propositions about life, thought, and perception in a way that persuades not merely with argument, but with music. The resulting experience is a thrilling “excavation of the nous,” drawing us into a realm where point of view, connotation, misdirection, and other rhetorical and prestidigitational devices are deployed in a tender but unyielding attack on the illusions we share. It also manages to be a really useful advice book where “[p]rophetic murmurs sough from every roadside gulch.” Open it at random and take a chance section to heart for the day or in relation to a particular problem. Seriously. And then, again, there is the music—the sound of words taking off into an infinite perspective of thought. That the reader gets to fly along is the pleasure and triumph of plain sight. –Laura Moriarty

About the Author: Writer and artist Steven Seidenberg is the author of plain sight, Situ, Null Set, Itch, and numerous chapbooks of poetry and aphorism. His collections of photographs include Pipevalve: Berlin, and Imaging Failure: Abandoned Lives of the Italian South. He has exhibited his visual work in Japan, Italy, Germany, Mexico, and the United States. From 2012-2017 he co-edited the poetry journal pallaksch.pallaksch. Based in San Francisco, Seidenberg travels broadly to give talks and readings, both focused on his own work as writer and photographer, and in collaboration with anthropologists, philosophers, and artists from around the world.