Attempts at a Life

Operating somewhere between fiction and poetry, biography and theory, the pieces in Danielle Dutton's ATTEMPTS AT A LIFE, though nominally stories, might indeed be thought of as attempts. They do what lively stories do best, creating worlds of possibility, worlds filled with surprises, but rather than bring these worlds to some sort of neat conclusion, they constantly push out towards something new. In S&M, a marriage suffers from the words you were always missing: sky, loft, music, dogs, pipes, puppets, war. In Mary Carmichael, a woman with a pair of scissors and the need to cut out her insatiable desire slices a veiled hat from a fern in a pot and a river out of a postbox. Like the experiments in found movement one character conducts (in Everybodys Autobiography), Duttons stories find movement wherever they turn, in every phrase and cadence, each sentence a small explosion of images and anthems and odd juxtapositions. This is writing in which the imagination (both writers and readers) is capable of producing almost anything at any moment, from a shiny penny to an alien metropolis, a burning village to a bright green bird.