Singed: Muted Voice-Transmissions, after the Fire

by Daniela Cascella

By means of improvisatory techniques spinning outward from the eye rhyme, in which similarities in spelling promise a rhyme that is not heard as such, Cascella’s rendering plastic of words time and again compels the reader to imagine and experience her writing’s multiple potential soundings. Singed is a powerful effort to compose from the memory of a writer without a library, a writer with a library destroyed. ––David Grubbs

Polymorphous and polyphonic, Cascella takes us on a quiet, highly personal walk through an eclectic range of texts and recordings, exploring their resonances with grace, dignity and humour. ––Juliet Jacques

This is a book about lost books, lost voices, learning to speak, no, to sing; to sing again, to read and write again after fire––it begins with what is lost. Yet, there is memory, recollection, impression; there is song that precedes speech––it might be called la lalangue. Encounters––literary, artistic, religious–resonate. Cascella’s writing is precise and ardent, leading the reader through a sophisticated, moving, intricate archive. It is a book to which I listen as I read it. I hear it now. ––Sharon Kivland

Cascella finds the grain of the voice in writing, drawing attention to words as both blunt signifiers and aetherial presences, teasing the distance between the two. She draws on a variety of traditions, whether Leiris, Michaux or Lispector, to make something uniquely her own, a way of writing that shimmers between narrative, memoir, criticism and sound made print. ––C.D. Rose

This is a text that could only emerge out of an intensive dwelling on listening to sound, music and those inner and internalised voices that speak silently of our listening, the incantation that remains private until written or voiced, sliding to the centre of the spell, now preoccupied not so much with the sound world but a greater domain of the unheard, unintelligible, unspeakable, always moving voice. ––From the Afterword by David Toop

168 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 1, 2017

Reviews

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Daniela Cascella is one of the most original writers I know. She writes of the unwritable—sound, voice, language. She reads the work of other writers, Lispector, van Niekerk, Jaeggy, Dinesen and more with an an ear to what is unspeakable. She is a writer who inspires writing and reading from angles and perspectives that arise from her Italian background, an acute attention to music and art, and an intentional decision to write in English. She seeks the "discomfortable" space.

I wrote a review/personal response to this book here: https://roughghosts.com/2017/12/15/to...