Songs of No Provenance by Lydi Conklin
A singer has to reckon with their pieces of their life after a sexually explicit moment on stage in this punk examination of fame and sexuality
Joan Vole is an almost-famous folk singer, living off of small venues and self-produced albums. After an on-stage moment of sexually explicit madness, she flees the city, takes a teaching gig and tries to figure out what to do with the pieces of her newly exploded life.
Lydi Conklin’s writing mirrors the punky folk style of her protagonist. The language of Songs of No Provenance is largely straightforward but there’s something jagged and discordant about it too. Every so often you snag upon a sentence that won’t quite smooth itself out, even if you go back over it two or three time. But its greatest strength is the way it pushes us into Joan’s perspective, complete with all of her blind spots. They’re never explicitly pointed out, but we can see all the places where Joan’s vision of herself, the world and her place within it doesn’t quite jive with reality.
As Joan turns the events of that fateful night over in her mind, Songs of No Provenance explores and re-explores ideas about artistic ethics, boundaries, gender lines and sexual borders in a way that’s often insightful and always empathetic. Unfortunately, it continues to revolve around these ideas after it has run out of fresh revelations, leading to a final third where introspection gives way to something more like navel-gazing, albeit with the gaze fixed a few inches further south.
