"This stunning essay collection explores sound, gender, queerness, survival, and the shaping of identity through voice and pop culture. Blending reportage, cultural criticism, and personal narrative, this beautiful, intimate debut is definitely the best 2024 book I've read so far."
–Rachel León, Chicago Review of Books
"Most Anticipated Books of January"
"Pace fuses memoir and criticism (my favorite combination) to explore the emotional and cultural impacts of women singers across time, from Cat Power and Rihanna to Kim Gordon and Whitney Houston. A queer coming-of-age story that centers the power of music and the legacies of women artists."
–Sophia M. Stewart, The Millions
"Most Anticipated: Great Winter 2024 Preview"
"Pace chronicles their shifting musical tastes and how these artists, along with others, factored into significant moments in their life."
–Tobias Carroll, Inside Hook
"10 books you should be reading this January"
"Pace's essays are a beautiful ode to how musicians can shape us. The collection is a must-read for any musicophile. Their passion reverberates on every page while exploring their life and the musicians they admire."
–Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful
"12 noteworthy debut books to read this January"
"The essays in Pace's collection detail their journey coming out as queer, influenced by their favorite women singers, including Whitney Houston, Cat Power, Madonna, and Rihanna."
–Michael Schaub, Orange County Register
"20 highly anticipated books coming in 2024"
"These essays span much more than women singers. They dive into sound, gender, queerness, the shaping of identity through voice and pop culture, and, yes, survival. The result is a collection with the vibe of a perfect mixtape. This compilation blends research, reportage, personal narrative, and cultural criticism, and each track offers something different and building off what came before... The collection resists easy classification–is it a memoir in essays or a collection of essays on pop culture? It's neither, it's both. The assemblage of this range of reportage, personal narrative, and cultural criticism, this hodgepodge of different forms, is itself queer. How beautiful for a book's form to echo what's at the heart of this collection: The intersection of pop culture, social issues, and personal experience make up Pace's claiming of their voice. And in doing so, they've helped me claim mine."
–Rachel León, Split Lip Magazine
REVIEW: I Sing to Use the Waiting
"Pace's beautiful prose and palpable passion make this soar..."
–Publishers Weekly
"With so many great books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books..."
–Poets & Writers' "Page One" features I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays About the Women Singers Who've Made Me Who I Am
From the January/February 2024 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine
"With a title referencing the first line and title of an Emily Dickinson poem, this debut book is a memoiristic essay collection about the women and nonbinary musicians who have influenced Pace's life... Pace relies on Freudian theories as a lens to view their own experiences as a queer person. They also employ an insightful, somewhat highbrow style of writing for subjects that are not always analyzed thoughtfully in the mainstream, such as Disney's Pocahontas and Rihanna... Readers who enjoyed Jessica Hopper's The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic and Hanif Abdurraqib's They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us are the perfect audience for this book."
–Heather Sheahan, Library Journal
"No higher praise have I for Zachary Pace and their yes once more delish collection of prose poems really about those songbirds that help give the queer soul their own voice. Covering national treasures including Cat Power, Whitney, Nina Simone, etc., it's a compendium born of a true consciousness, one that is serious about and committed to articulating writing's best and true subject: how we speak, and why."
–Hilton Als, author of White Girls and 2017 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Criticism
"I've been waiting a long time to read a book as soulful and precise, in its treatment of listening, as Zachary Pace's tender account of an identity put back together through the powerful elixir of singing women. Pace, a lover of the overlooked, attends to the brocaded minutiae of triumphs, comebacks, travails. To enunciation and excess, Pace brings a curatively lucid eye and ear, each vignette invested with lyric care, and with a fastidious affection for the contours of a singer's career. This impeccable book sends me back, with a renewed heart, to the songs Pace masterfully covers, with a delivery as splendid, as emotionally impressive, as the lauded originals."
–Wayne Koestenbaum, poet, critic, novelist, artist, and performer
"Zachary Pace's I Sing to Use the Waiting is an exhilarating mix, part memoir, part examination of queer identity, part investigation into corporate heteronormativity and the internalized homophobia it produces in children and others who are still growing into who they are–and so much more, all of it approached via the lenses of the singers (and their lives) whom Pace encountered at pivotal moments in their own growing up. In considering a recording made by Nina Simone, for example, Pace comes to understand voice itself as a form of queerness, straddling registers, enacting a fluidity that refuses binary thinking; other singers–Fiona Apple, Mariah Carey, Joanna Newsom–become a source of actual vocabulary 'for interpreting the world'; and in a discussion of Kim Gordon and Sonic Youth, Pace considers lyrics and music as entryways to the sublime, as a way 'to remember the demise that is my only destiny, relieved I've eluded it for now.' At one point, Pace says of Rihanna's career that it 'enacts a singularly liberating experience of identity expression.' I'd say the same for I Sing to Use the Waiting, a beautifully provocative, smart, and tender book indeed."
–Carl Phillips, 2023 Pulitzer Prize winning author of Then the War: And Selected Poems (2022)
"Zachary Pace takes listening & fanhood to a teeming level of worship which is exactly what it is. Beautiful precise quirky bodily cerebral listening to female vocalists and writing about it. I'm so in awe of what I get when I read this dedicated performance of that. I think Kim (Gordon) should hear, Chan (Marshall) should hear. The chapter on the Kabbalah (and Madonna) was so astonishing. God should hear too: this miraculous and fun and deeply cool book that's really about sound and our relationship to it, gendered, historic, mortal and true."
–Eileen Myles, poet, novelist and art journalist
"What makes up the soundtrack of our lives? In this smart, captivating collection of essays, Zachary Pace brings us theirs–an eclectic, fascinating, often groundbreaking group of frontwomen whose words and voices have defined not only the larger culture, but also who the author is and who they might yet be. The essays in I Sing to Use the Waiting deftly move from informative to deeply personal and back again, breaking down songs and words and voices that cannot be contained, that exist inside a world that is both mystifying and oppressive. If you've ever played a song or album so many times your neighbors complained; if you've ever obsessively analyzed playlists of shows near and far; if you've ever found a voice, a lyric, a harmony saving your life: this one's for you."
–Lynn Melnick, author of I've Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton
"What draws us to the sound of another person's voice? What magnetizes others to our own? I Sing to Use the Waiting is not only a thrilling homage to a group of majestic women, but an exploration into the nature of voice itself–that queer and primal animal signature. Zachary Pace writes with electric intensity. A total joy."
–Paul Lisicky, author of Later: My Life at the Edge of the World
"I love music and I love women in music even more, so this collection of personal essays by Zachary Pace rang nearly all my bells. I love the way Pace connects these women to their own personal development and understanding of who they are. In thinking back, I realize how much women in music shaped me as well (Madonna, Kim, Kathleen, Courtney, Mariah, Janet). This collection also helped deepen my understanding of why women singers are so important to the queer community. I learned a lot, I remembered a lot, I thought a lot."
–Laurel Kane, White Whale Bookstore (Pittsburgh, PA)
"Madonna, Gloria Estefan, Cher, Rhianna. What do these female musical acts have in common? Their aura of superstardom that catapulted them into the stratosphere of queer divaness! Author Zachary Pace's essay collection pays tribute to the numerical female singers that shaped LGBTQ culture, influenced fans and music enthusiasts detailing the talent of their vocal resonance and unique sound to becoming unlikely icons for the rebels and outliers of society!"
–Gerard Villegas, Auntie's Books (Spokane, WA)
Zachary Pace is a writer and editor who lives in New York City, whose first book is I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays About the Women Singers Who've Made Me Who I Am, and whose writing has been published in the Baffler, BOMB, Bookforum, Boston Review, Frieze magazine, Interview magazine, Literary Hub, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the PEN Poetry Series, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. More work can be found at zacharypace.com.
