Description:
In Studio of the Voice, master essayist Marcia Aldrich is at her finest as she invites readers along for a personal exploration of women's lives. The essays take on dazzling forms-each of them to be discovered, savored, and shared.
Review Quotes:
Essaying is the best way to freeze and examine and better understand the shifting phantasmagoria of our experiences in families and societies, and Marcia Aldrich's Studio of the Voice is a whole collection of essays par excellence. With eager, associative mind, Aldrich gathers and explores intergenerational conflicts and conundrums, generating meditative momentum toward a new vision of how we should, and can, relate to one another.
-Patrick Madden, author of Disparates: EssaysIn Studio of the Voice, Marcia Aldrich creates a studio of the voice-driven essay. Endlessly curious, digressive, formally inventive, these essays shine a light on an essential quality of the essay: it's not about the epiphany, but process, the questions one asks. Long one of our very best essayists, Aldrich is undaunted at the dark door of the multifaceted truths self-investigation can yield, though sometimes, surprisingly, it is only the door that is dark. One essay by Marcia Aldrich is a cause for celebration. This rangy new book should provoke a parade. A signal achievement, Studio of the Voice is an essential book of essays.
-David Lazar, author of Celeste Holm Syndrome and founding editor of Hotel AmerikaNo writer evokes the way Marcia Aldrich evokes. For every scene she writes, story she tells, detail she describes, she palpates the imagination. This book is physicality incarnate. I can feel her hands as they clutch a bedpost, soothe a cheek slap, twist the chain of a pair of smudged reading glasses hanging around the neck, warm with a flash of menopause, rub the arch of Marilyn Monroe's foot, burnish beauty, weigh the heaviness of rejection, thrill at the joy of a backflip, and press through dark water with the joy of swimming. Studio of the Voice maintains that we are most human when we are most embodied. Aldrich makes us feel fully human as she gives voice to her own body and the bodies of others in this vibrantly corporeal book.
-Nicole Walker, author of Processed Meat: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating DisasterStudio of the Voice is a polyphonic study in the nature of voice.
-Jocelyn Bartkevicius, author of "How to Survive in Lithuania" and former editor of Florida Review