Prairie, Dresses, Art, and Heavy Metal
Words by Danielle Dutton, Music by Cameron Winter
Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other by Danielle Dutton. Coffee House Press, 2024
The other night one of the members of my writing group brought a story to share in which the protagonist sits on the toilet in her new house looking at the scratches around the handle on the bathroom door. She speculates how the scratches might have been made, and as the speculations grow increasingly far-fetched we find ourselves moving both closer to the narrator and further from her seat on the pot into a slew of alternate realities. The story reminded me of Dutton’s book, which to read is to experience an utter sense of unmooring as its pieces taunt any notion of pindownable genre—fiction, essay, criticism, drama crash together like a delightful contagion (the book) partying its way through an organism (you). My favorite pieces in the collection are those that drift furthest afield of any sort of norm: “Sixty-Six Dresses I Have Read,” a found piece that reproduces snippets of texts that mention or include a dress in some way; and “Pool of Tears,” a one-act play that may be one of the most remarkably autistic (a compliment) and unperformable works of theatre I have read. It’s an experience, all of it. Go have it for yourself.
Heavy Metal by Cameron Winter. Partisan Records, 2024
I am obsessed with this album at the moment. It sounds unlike anything else I’ve heard as of late, the spawn of a Nick Drake and Van Morrison and Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen menage a quatre. Warm and dusty and barely-in-tune and majestic and intimate. Winter’s voice jerks and tremors and croaks and lifts with unexpected full-throated truth. The songs are filled with trinkets and exclamations and track marks that might have been plucked from a pawn shop. The lyrics are chintzy and redundant and full of spectacle and spot-on, some of the best since Destroyer’s Kaputt. Makes me want to ellipsis. Makes me want to dislocate a shoulder. Makes me want to scab. Makes me want to animal a landscape. Makes me want to necklace a neck. Makes me want to plunge into toxic sludge. Makes me want to be kissed and insulted. Makes me want to restate the unspoken manifesto. Blah blah human being. I don’t know. Might be an instant classic.