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Alice Fulton's writing has been characterized by The New Yorker as "electrifying," and the poet herself, according to Publishers Weekly, "may be Dickinson's postmodern heir."

Alice Fulton's writing has been characterized by The New Yorker as "electrifying," and the poet herself, according to Publishers Weekly, "may be Dickinson's postmodern heir." Dance Script With Electric Ballerina, Fulton's award-winning first book, is now considered a classic of contemporary poetry. On its release, reviewers commented: "She achieves . . . intellectual substance . . . without sacrificing emotional richness. Fulton's lively, distinctive style and buoyant faith . . . are most evident." -- Choice "Her fast-paced verse rolls off the tongue like colloquial speech, or flows like rhythms of American jazz." -- Publishers Weekly "Fulton's distinct voice marks her as a poet to watch." -- Library Journal One of "two extremely impressive poetic debuts in 1983. By the time she's through, we want to shout 'encore!'" -- David Lehman, Newsday and The Philadelphia Inquirer "Reading her . . . you must sharpen your spirit to be moved by what is uncanny and rare." -- Matthew Gilbert, The Boston Review "Delightful, energetic poems, alive with the exhilaration of creation." -- Stephen C. Behrendt, Prairie Schooner

A profound and perceptive fourth collection of poetry explores the themes of science, popular culture, feminism, gender roles, stereotypes, and social institutions. Reprint.

In this groundbreaking collection, Alice Fulton weds her celebrated linguistic freshness to a fierce emotional depth. Felt—a fabric made of tangled fibers—becomes a metaphor for the interweavings of humans, animals, and planet. But Felt is also the past tense of "feel." This is a book of emotions both ordinary and untoward: the shadings of humiliation, obsession, love, and loneliness—as well as states so subtle they have yet to be named. Reticent and passionate, elliptical yet available, Fulton's poems consider flaws and failure, touching and not touching. They are fascinated with proximity: the painter's closeness to the canvas, the human kinship with animals, the fan's nearness to the star. Privacy, the opening and closing of doors, is at the heart of these poems that sing the forms of solitude-the meanings and feelings of virginity, the single-mindedness of fetishism, the tragedy of suicide. Rather than accept the world as given, Fulton encounters invisible assumptions with magnitude and grace. Hers is a poetry of inconvenient knowledge, in which the surprises of enlightenment can be cruel as well as kind. Felt, a deeply imagined work, at once visceral and cerebral, illuminates the possibilities of twenty-first century poetry.

Over the past twenty years, Alice Fulton has emerged as one of the most brilliant and honored poets of her generation. She is also among the most thrillingly inventive, compassionate, and necessary. Cascade Experiment charts the evolution of a poetics that revises the limits of language, emotion, and thought.

In 1908, Mamie Garrahan faces childbirth aided by her arsenic-eating sister-in-law Kitty, a nun who grows opium poppies, and a doctor who prescribes Bayer Heroin. "In the twentieth century, I believe there are no saints left," Mamie remarks. But her daughters and granddaughter test this notion with far-reaching consequences. Kitty's arsenic reappears sixty years later in the hands of her distraught niece. A schoolgirl's passion for the Beatles and Melville a passion both lonely and funny shapes her life. Each decade is illuminated by endearingly eccentric characters: an anorexic waitress falls for a wealthy college boy in the jazz age...an exuberant young nurse questions science during the Depression...a homely seamstress designs a scandalous dress in the 1950s. The Nightingales of Troy, the first fiction collection by an acclaimed American poet, creates a vividly palpable sense of time and place. Alice Fulton's memorable characters confront the deepest dilemmas with bravery and abiding love."

Alice Fulton reimagines the great lyric subjects--time, death, love--and imbues them with fresh urgency and depth. Barely Composed unveils the emotional devastations that follow trauma or grief--extreme states that threaten psyche and language with disintegration. With rare originality, the poems illuminate the deepest suffering and its aftermath of hypervigilance and numbness, the "formal feeling" described by Emily Dickinson. Elegies contemplate temporal mysteries--the brief span of human/animal life, the nearly eternal existence of stars and nuclear fuel, the enduring presence of the arts--and offer unsparing glimpses of personal loss and cultural suppressions of truth. Under the duress of silencing, whether chosen or imposed, language warps into something uncanny, rich, and profoundly moving. Various forms of inscription--coloring book to redacted document--enact the combustible power of the unsaid.Though "anguish is the universal language," there also is joy in the reciprocity of gifts and creativity, intellect and intimacy. Gorgeous vintage rhetorics merge with incandescent contemporary registers, and this recombinant linguistic mix gives rise to poems of disarming power. Visionaries--truth tellers, revelators, beholders--offer testimony as beautiful as it is unsettling.Shimmering with the "good strangeness of poetry," Barely Composed bears witness to love's complexities and the fragility of existence. In the midst of cruelty, a world in which "the pound is by the petting zoo," Fulton's poems embrace the inextinguishable search for goodness, compassion, and "the principles of tranquility."

“I was living in a high-maintenance loneliness,” Alice Fulton writes of a devastating accident, and her poems express both reverence and impatience as they search for a brightness palpable as the dark. The result is a brilliant coloratura on the senses. Fulton evokes phantom aromas of vanished perfumes, flowers fragrant only at night, and the ozone scent of snow; marvels at velvet paintings and chimerical colors outside the spectrum; and riffs on a mixtape of ambient sounds: applause, clinking glasses, spectral voices on the radio, and the whispers of a mother to her children. Coloratura On A Silence Found In Many Expressive Systems extends these tactile mysteries to existential questions of invisible miracles, connection, and faith in the face of silence: “By praying you, I create you,” the poet informs an elusive God. Reveling in the stunning possibilities of language, Fulton seeks joy to counteract trauma and grief, empathizes with the silent pathos of animals, and finds solace in art, friendship, and the mysterious power of gifts. Without denying suffering, this enthralling volume extends a fervent prayer for gratitude and healing.

"I was living in a high-maintenance loneliness", Alice Fulton writes of a devastating accident, and her poems express both reverence and impatience as they search for a brightness palpable as the dark. The result is a brilliant coloratura on the senses. Fulton evokes phantom aromas of vanished perfumes, flowers fragrant only at night, and the ozone scent of snow; marvels at velvet paintings and chimerical colours outside the spectrum; and riffs on a mixtape of ambient sounds: applause, clinking glasses, spectral voices on the radio and the whispers of a mother to her children. Coloratura On A Silence Found In Many Expressive Systems extends these tactile mysteries to existential questions of invisible miracles, connection, and faith in the face of silence: "By praying you, I create you", the poet informs an elusive God. Revelling in the stunning possibilities of language, Fulton seeks joy to counteract trauma and grief, empathises with the silent pathos of animals, and finds solace in art, friendship and the mysterious power of gifts. Without denying suffering, this enthralling volume extends a fervent prayer for gratitude and healing.

Powers of Congress exhibits, in dazzling language and complex rhetorical structures, a passionate curiosity about all aspects of modern American life. Sven Birkerts, in The Boston Review, called Fulton a "prodigiously gifted poet," and Powers of Congress more than meets that claim. Back by popular demand, this is a reprint of an important collection that continues to exert a wide influence upon contemporary poetics. It will surely intoxicate all those who love the erotic involvement of language with thought. "She is an ambitious, powerful poet.... She is a thematic gambler of the best sort. Her poems are daring and broad."—Eavan Boland, Partisan Review "Powers of Congress is a rigorous, generous book, by one of the finest young poets in the country."—David Baker, Poetry "In Powers of Congress Alice Fulton shows she's learned a thing or two about levitation."—David Barber, Hungry Mind Review Marketing plans for Powers of Congress o Newsletter, brochure, catalog, and postcard mailings. o Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines. Powers of Congress was first published by David R. Godine in 1990. Alice Fulton's other books of poems include Felt, Sensual Math, Palladium, and Dance Script with Electric Ballerina. A collection of her essays, Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry, was published by Graywolf Press in 1999. Alice Fulton's poems appear in five editions of The Best American Poetry series, as well as in The Best of the Best American Poetry. She is currently Professor of English at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan.