KERNPUNKT Press, November 2020

KERNPUNKT Press, November 2020

 

“M will be born many times over, always in a solitary space where shadows roll with the sound of waves and the winter is long with night …”

In an intimate conversation with the paintings of Maine modernist, Marsden Hartley, Tight Little Vocal Cords takes readers on 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.

On Sale Now!

“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 Božena Němcová and Liliane’s Balcony

 

“In this virtuosic novel, a young man named M, recently orphaned, leaves the bleak New England island of his birth for the love-hungry burlesque worlds of between-the-wars San Francisco and Berlin.  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.  Rawding absolutely dazzles in this vibrant, wise, and moving debut.”

Joseph Scapellato, author of The Made-Up Man

 

“From kelpy island wasteland to fur-lined Babylon and back, Loie Rawding takes us on a burning spiral journey across velvet beaches and sandy sheets. I suggest reading with your eyes half-closed and your mouth wide open. I suggest reading hungry, by phosphorescence, through dirty ice and onionskin. Tight Little Vocal Cords is a book of blurred tastes and scummed up textures. 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