cover image I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death, and the Radio

I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death, and the Radio

Jean Feraca, . . Univ. of Wisconsin/Terrace, $24.95 (164pp) ISBN 978-0-299-22390-8

As a poet and Wisconsin Public Radio's “Distinguished Senior Broadcaster,” Feraca knows the power of the well-chosen word. Feraca (South from Rome ) grew up attuned to language, with her flamboyant, “Old World Italian patriarch” father defiantly reciting poetry to her mother's cold criticism. Feraca's traditionally Catholic upbringing was full of stories of “saints and virgin martyrs,” which gave her “an enduring template of courage and heroism,” even if they imparted a taste for suffering that left her “vulnerable to abuse.” Feraca tells stories of her dearly eccentric brother, her demented mother, her wretched first and second marriages, her attempt to live the monastic life, her passion for her third husband and his taste in wine. Most remarkable, however, is her account of that pivotal moment when she took Donald Hall's creative writing seminar. Ignoring her disastrous marriage as she immersed herself in writing, she was “Rapunzel, spinning straw into gold.” Blending the spiritual and the profane, Feraca is beguiling. (Sept.)