Attempts at a Life

Attempts at a Life by Danielle Dutton (Tarpaulin Sky Press) is described like this:

Operating somewhere between fiction and poetry, biography and theory, the pieces in 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.

The reason why it appears on this blog is because one of these stories is a re-telling of Jane Eyre. Cahiers de Corey describes it like this:

[I]t's a gorgeously produced book, but of course it's the content that's really grabbing me. She calls them stories but I think of them as prose poems, and I'm taken with the first one, "Jane Eyre," which is a bent retelling of the novel that engages, I think, with the powerful sense of identification that most women (and quite a few men) have with its uncannily "real" heroine. It's a kind of reading that foregrounds subjectivity as an activity, as recognition.

And GrayCub says:

For extra credit I went to a poetry reading tonight. The first reader was the delicate, subtle, witty, and beautiful Danielle Dutton. Her poem "Jane Eyre" is a reinterpretation of the classic character/story, and I've never laughed so hard over any poem.

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre