Tight Little Vocal Cords

Loie Rawding's debut novel is a prismatic journey into the depths of one young person's chaotic psychic and physical awakening. Part fiction, part poetry, part cabaret, Rawding sketches a surreal world that is at once historical and hauntingly modern; a place where to deep dive into love can save, and to stay silent will most certainly destroy. The reader surges along on a sparkling current of daring language and insightful structural play, carried into overlapping landscapes of sexuality and history, love and isolation, and form and feeling, always eddying back to the wondrous, grief-laden mystery of embodiment.

-Joseph Scapellato, author of The Made-Up Man It's a book of flesh-filled phantoms singing in pornosophical chorus. Their song will leave you silky, limp-lidded, stained, and strangely sated.

-Joanna Ruocco, author of The Whitmire Incident, Dan, and Another Governess Loie Rawding's dazzling Tight Little Vocal Cords is ekphrastic, ecstatic, and epistolary. It is a story not so much of characters as of body parts: flesh, thighs, and tongues with their own language and desires. It is a story of departures and returns amid a lifelong quest for love and art. Referring to her subject-the modernist painter Marsden Hartley-simply as M, Rawding creates an aching portrait, both abstract and expressive, through prose blocks filled with color and light; through a chorus of Sailors; and through a series of letters from Yours Truly.

-Kelcey Parker Ervick, author of The Bitter Life of Bozena Nemcov? and Liliane's Balcony