plain sight

Author: Steven Seidenberg

Publisher: Roof Books (2020)

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