At Rain Taxi, Peter Connors reviews Danielle Dutton’s Attempts at a Life.
With a dizzying turn of sentences, Danielle Dutton uses Gertrude Stein’s technique of “insistence” (also known as repetition) to create a palpable intensity, and the playful, yet precise simplicity of the word choice in her debut collection, Attempts at a Life, marks Dutton as the descendent of the modernist portraits by—and of—both Stein and Pablo Picasso, as handed down through Language poetry, prose poetry and experimental fiction lineages….
In section after section in Attempts at a Life, Danielle Dutton executes expert, miniscule language slips that make us slide down the surface of her narratives like raindrops streaking the windows of the last un-gentrified house in an old Victorian neighborhood….
It most certainly introduces an important new literary voice.
Read the full review.
See also: Attempts at a Life and all posts tagged Danielle Dutton.
