. Prairie, Dresses, Art Other, Danielle Dutton , (Prototype, 2024), 172 pages, £12 . .
For Danielle Dutton a dress is not just an item of clothing but a literary happening, a poetry of experience, a mood, a moment, a motion in time. In her latest collection of prose (fiction, essays and a play), these happenings occur in abundance and create an opportunity for readers to touch the superb seams, grasp the intertextual threads and inhabit the marvellous folds of Dutton’s words. Polyvocal, layered and richly imaginative like her earlier works – Margaret the First, SPRAWL and Attempts at a Life – Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other revels in the aural and material possibilities of language as much as what it connotes.
Moving through four individual yet intersecting sections, the collection spins inner landscapes out of literal ones, a whole catalogue of literary outfits from a single descriptive scrap or fragment, and diverse temporalities from an isolated instant. Moving through the black holes of the universe to the imaginative galaxies of her characters’ roving minds, the vivid filaments of prairie plants as well as their botanical etymons, Dutton’s work allows us to dwell in the wonder of the world as well as the written word. Making a persuasive statement about communion with and through art, between readers and writers, authors and artists, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other is as much a manifesto about artmaking and community-building, as it is a conserver and explorer of re.
