Book Description
A fiercely imagined work, at once visceral and cerebral, by a poet of unremitting courage and linguistic intelligence. This groundbreaking collection considers the shadings of humiliation, obsession, love, failure, and loneliness—as well as subtle states that have yet to be named. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Instant capture
From the opening poem "Close (Joan Mitchell's 'White Territory')" this book dives inside you and holds court until you assume its power.This astonishing range of poems can make sparks last for what seems an eternity."Failure" conjures up images from Henry IV, Part One, while "The Fabula Rasa" delves into the author's past in radio broadcasting, as does "Warmth Sculpture."Stop reading this review and make the purchase. ... Read more

Amazon.com
"The better part of fairness is the willingness to move toward what is given rather than impose one's own aesthetic on a book. This approach--a sympathetic leaning toward the work coupled with patient rereading--is the one I've tried to realize." In this collection, poet Alice Fulton looks at her craft from a critic's perspective, exploring the "good strange or eccentric" world of postmodern poetry. In order to do this, Fulton has divided her book into five parts; the first, "Process," explores the multitudes of filters that stand between the writer/reader and the work--everything from the computer screen to that judgmental internal editor "invested with the power of entry and exclusion.""Poetics" investigates the forms postmodern poetry takes, supporting the "free and fractal" with an in-depth examination of prosody, linguistics, and even the relationships between quantum physics and poetry. In "Powers" Fulton takes a look at two misunderstood poets: the 18th-century Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, and the 19th-century Emily Dickinson--both considered "eccentric" in their own times."Praxis" is a meditation on the author's own work, and she follows it up with the final section, "Penchants," which contains three essay-reviews on a number of modern poets.Anyone interested in the state of postmodern poetry will find much food for thought in Alice Fulton's Feeling As a Foreign Language. --Margaret Prior Book Description

Customer Reviews (4)

A splendid reflection on poetry
Alice Fulton here offers beautifully crafted essays on poets and poetry, emphasizing the power of estrangement that gives lyric much of its interest. Emily Dickinson plays an important role in this book, but above all the reader will find elegant and telling formulations about poetry's exploration of possibilities of feeling.

Excellent, Challenging, and Accessible
Let's keep it simple: this is a challenging but accessible and rewarding book.It's not surprising that some professional reviewers have carped; the book takes them (often deservedly) to task for preaching "karaokepoetics," parroting with increasing volume and decreasing originalitythings that were said -- and tired -- a decade ago.Fulton's chapters onher own poetry and on Dickinson are outstanding, but the whole rewards evena casual reading.Though it's prose in format, the book is still a poem --a fractal poem -- in the way it plays with its subject matter, diverges onflights of fancy and whimsy, reveals the poet as a person rather than acold auctorial voice, etc.

Startling ideas, gorgeously written
Not since I read Wallace Steven's 'The Necessary Angel' 25 years ago have I felt such a wide-ranging intelligence in a book of essays on poetry. Fulton uses theories of science in absolutely startling ways. Readers withany interest in rich metaphors will find much here that is positivelyexciting and new. Her two essays on what she's calling "fractalverse" are solid, thoughtful, and full of possibilities for wherepoetry can take us. So far as I know, no poet has ever before described the"poem plane" and how poets are at the threshold of"breaking" through it. To me, this is as significant as Pound'sidea of "breaking" the pentameter was when it was first proposed.This book is the work of a true visionary.

Worth the Work
I've got to admit that I'm beginning to lose my patience with a lot of Alice Fulton's critics, many of whom seem to toss disparaging words her way with the flippant anxiousness of young children encountering and smothering something new and intimidating."How do you know that you don't likebroccoli if you won't *try* it," and how will these writers ever lenda thoughtful critical perspective if they can't stop harping on Fulton forrefusing to tow a more conventional, accessible critical stance?Theirgeneric vision ought not be Fulton's problem.It's not my mission here,however, to get into a long dialogue about the critics (Amazon wouldn'tpost it anyway), but to instead come to the aid of an engaging,challenging, and vital new book of essays.Fulton's volume circumscribes atheory (let's make it more approachable)--a notion--of poetics that standsto breathe new life into a discipline that is fast becoming a solipsisticbasketweaving in and around the zillion MFA programs of our nation'suniversities.Her implicit enthusiasm for sharp words (she bitinglyassigns an anonymous, well-known poet the name Halcyon Angeltongue) and forpoetry's good *potential* in these pieces is so forward-thinking andrefreshing that I found myself, ruffling through the pages, suddenlygrandly optimistic for poetry's contemporary cause.In these pieces: Fulton lights on the "screens," both figurative and literal, thatfall between reader and object, individual and elements.She comes to thegenerous aesthetic aid of famous and unfamous poets alike, reorganizingconventional approaches to poetic criticism with precision and concertedcare.And Fulton envisions an exciting, strenuous new school of"fractal poetry" (challenging and quite seaworthy), which"looks to chaos and complexity theory as touchstones for contemporaryaesthetics.These pieces suggest that as free verse broke the pentameter,fractal verse can break the poem plane or linguistic surface."Thiswriting is gleamingly new and often makes for difficult maneuvering, butit's always a dance worth learning, worth the work. ... Read more

Book Description
Highlights from each of Alice Fulton's groundbreaking, prize-winning poetry books.

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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Good Collection from Cornell's Poet Laureate
CASCADE EXPERIMENT collects a lot of the important pieces from six earlier books by Ithaca's Alice Fulton, who teaches there and has taken the place of A R Ammons as the person people think of when they try to think of a poet at Cornell.Unlike a previous reviewer, I never once thought of the word, "percepticide" when I read through this career-making book, but I agree it's an interesting idea and it would be a good prism through which to examine Alice Fulton's poetry.Even the earliest poetry, where she was writing Plath-like, resonant dirges about her father, had to it an abundance of culture.She is the supremely cultured poet, as Wallace Stevens was to a previous generation (he died in 1955).What we get in CASCADE EXPERIMENT is a willingness to try to listen to the other party, which I do agree, would have been a valuable lesson to learn from Abu Ghraib.Like the training bras she speaks of in her poem, "Cherry Bombs," asking, "What did training bras train/ breasts to do?Hadn't I been told/ when stranger offered dirty candy/ /to say no?" she deplores our culture in which we just don't talk to each other often, and when we do, we mistake for hostility or aggression the other party's point of view.Without other people in our universe, and more important;y their voices, we would be nothing but trophies on the wall--brass emblems of which Fulton writes, in another important poem, "Brass wombs/ they bear transcendence/ without blood, pus, piss, spit, snot, or come./Like children, they cry, I won."She sees clearly that children can often be cruel, but that it is not the same thing as adult cruelty, the children are still trying to make it into the mirror stage, feeling themselves unappreciated because they see ow way to distinguish themselves not only from their peers, but from the entire surround.I think poets sometimes feel this way as well.In "Art Thou The Thing I Wanted," Fulton tries to distinguish her priorities, to take stock in middle age."Everything happens to me, I think,/ as anything reminds me of you: the real estate/ /most local, most removed."

She is both local and removed, and also real, like the "real estate" through which the bourgeoise attempts to maintain its grip on society and ontology.

In some ways she is even better than Ammons, who never cared a fig for questions like these.

Beautiful and Compassionate
As I was reading this stunning book, the word "percepticide" kept coming back to me. It was coined by Diana Taylor, and it sums up what Alice Fulton is getting at: that we Americans are mostly blinded by our culture. We're unwilling to look deeply and closely at the things that are most disturbing about our consumerism, our injustice, our cruelty. These poems made me think deeply about these issues: there is a continuing war against women; our culture can be so cold and cruel as to drive human beings to suicide; we have totally desensitized ourselves to the suffering imposed daily on animals; our ability to inflict pain on animals makes it easier for us to dehumanize (think Abu Ghraib) other peoples and inflict pain on them; we must not trust authority; we are infatuated with consumerism; we are destroying our environment; we need to practice compassion. We are the culture, and the culture becomes what it is by our unwillingness to look into ourselves and see how the little things we do every day build the culture. These poems are so carefully crafted, so intricately connected, so cumulative in their stance, and so ethically powerful, that I found it hard to deny the effect they had on me as I read them.That's the reason I'm writing this review (my first). I am so knocked out by the political power of this book that I wanted to spread the word. The cumulative effect of this book is exhilirating. There is so much right now that gives us cause to despair, and Fulton counters it withgenerosity, openness, humor, and a total absence of preachiness. The extraordinary, startling language in these poems, the way Fulton uses words "to build worlds" made me feel hopeful and energized, like Fulton, "trying to open wide" to the possibilities and hard personal work of creating a just world.

Perfect Pitch
I've read some of Alice Fulton's poems before. So what do I think of her Selected? In all honesty, Fulton makes reading seem worth doing, worth the effort. Her poetry has ideas as well as feelings and vice versa. She has perfect pitch and can be moving (sad) or moving (funny). I read A LOT of contemporary poetry, andafter having read her poems "Some Cool" and "Split the Lark", I can say there is no living poet I respect more. This is the best book of poems I've read in years, the kind that will pay you back with interest every time you return to it. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Eye-watering performance
How does one convey the sense of what it means to write poetry? Read "Your Card Read 'Poet-Mechanic'" in this volume to understand the power of Alice Fulton's work. How can one conceivably write a poem about dust?Read "Toward Clairvoyance" to appreciate her brilliance. This book is a work that grabs your instinct and won't let go. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Emotion through science to words
Those familiar with Alice Fulton's later works should not miss this exquisite collection of poems.The multiple meanings of "palladium" are reflected in the many layers of her inventive approach to language.From the opening poem "Babies," she forces connections previously unknown and in doing so makes one feel a renewed sense of what English can do.Look into the crystal called "Works on Paper" with its alliteration ("kisses like collusions") and see traces of Clifford Odets ("dears like daggers").Her attraction to science as a source of metaphor appears eloquently in "The New Affluence", and the allusion to the museum world found in her latest collection (Felt) is foreshadowed in "Where are the Stars Pristine".As with the photographic process she describes in the preface to Part IV of this book, these poems display "beautiful rich blacks unobtainable with silver." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Keep referring back to this book!
I keep this book out where I can keep referring back to it while insisting all my friends should have a copy too.

Organize Every Area In Your Home
This book will show you how to deal, once and for all, with chronic clutter, lack of space, and the irritating lost-and-found pattern in your home. This book will show you how to put your home in order and keep it that way. The authors have added one vital step, not normally found in a book of this type. They show you how to find more places to put stuff by simplifying first, then organizing.

Learn of the authors easy eight-step system for simplifying any room in your house.
Step 1. Prepare your family
Step 2. Collect containers
Step 3. Work in a clockwise pattern
Step 4. Evaluate and assign
Step 5. Ask yourself the right questions
Step 6. Group and store like items together
Step 7. Use memento boxes for sentimental items
Step 8. Enjoy the empty space

On your mark, get set, go .... It is best to purchase this book as a household reference book. Copies are currently available on Amazon at under $4.

George MacPherson Reid

A Very Helpful Book!!
This book was a huge help. They help you to look at EVERY area of your home. The book is laid out very simple and you can skip over the chapters that don't pertain to your own home. They did offer some advice that I don't agree with (I don't agree with getting rid of EVERYTHING) and the idea of hanging drawstring bags on the inside of every closet door?? (I think that sounds a little tacky.) But, other than that this book is a quick read, which is helpful so you can get started right away! I defintly recommend this book to anyone trying to get organized!

It's Here Somewhere
I love this book!It was the first book on organization I ever purchased, and I wouldn't be without it.It makes the awesome task of decluttering your entire home very manageable.The process is broken into easy steps,and once you get going, you can't believe you lived with clutter all yourlife prior to buying this book.I've read many other books, but this oneis one of the best.I do have one caution.The first time I read thebook, and went through the process, I followed every "rule." Basically, their motto is, "Get rid of everything you don't use, like,have room for, need or want."I got rid of binoculars (because Ihadn't used them up to that point), a set of ivory dominoes (that I didn'tknow were ivory, until after I sold them,--because I didn't play dominoes),an antique 1 cent NYC parking meter (because it was my husbands before wegot married, and we lived in a small apartment, and I had know emotionalattachment to it, etc.So there are some things you keep, just because,even if you don't need them or think you don't have room.

How to streamline so that cleaning is easy
I've read many books on how to organize, how to declutter, etc. but have found none to be as straight forward and helpful as this one.The authors do not spend too much time trying to entertain, they teach. Perhaps thereare many others out there who are not messy as much as they are overwhelmedwith where to put stuff. This book helps! ... Read more

Book Description

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.

Book Description
Word count: 1820. ... Read more

Book Description

Term paper due tomorrow? Need to cram for a test? Or just looking for the best information about a favorite literary work?

Turn to "Poetry for Students" to get your research done in record time. Brought to you by Thomson Gale--the world's leading source of literary criticism and analysis--this e-doc contains: author biography; poem summary; poem text (if available); discussion of the work's themes, style, and historical context; a compendium of in-depth critical material; study questions; suggestions for further reading; and much more.

Why choose "Poetry for Students"? Because no other source offers so much in such a compact package. Trust the experts: Thomson Gale--and "Poetry for Students." ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from World Literature Today, published by University of Oklahoma on January 1, 2002. The length of the article is 407 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Alice Fulton: Felt. (book review)
Author: Doris Earnshaw
Publication: World Literature Today (Refereed)
Date: January 1, 2002
Publisher: University of Oklahoma
Volume: 76Issue: 1Page: 163(1)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Book Description
Set in Troy, New York, this linked collection follows a quirky and resilient family of women throughout the twentieth century.

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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

A great read: Yes. Dickinson: No.
The title to my review pretty much sums it up. Fulton is a great writer and Sensual Math is definitely worth reading (more than once.) But comparing her to Emily Dickinson is a little outrageous. As poet Li-Young Lee once observed about Emily Dickinson, "you could spend a life time unpacking the meaning from her poems." Fulton is good, but she isn't THAT good!

Poem Envy
I read this book after I looked at a list by Matthew Boroson, "humbly amazed." It's a great list, a course in wonder, as he calls it. Of the contemporary poets he recommends, Alice Fulton is the most fearless, and for my money, the best. Who else would begin a poem: "Is beige a castrate of copper, pink, and taste?" ("Fuzzy Feelings") She's wild, but her work is not obscure. Gender-bending, Elvis (!), lace, particle physics... it's all here folks, and never said more richly. I guess the highest praise I can offer is to say that I wish I'd written this book. Yup, I have poem envy. I highly recommend this book.

Publishers Weekly should be ashamed of itself
Fulton is not Dickinson; the comparison is spurious, and a detriment, finally, to Fulton's talent. This is an interesting collection, but, I think, one not able to sustain the hyperbolic praise that is has garnered. Still, it is worth a close read.

Maybe I'm not qualified, but I'll still speak my peace
Let's preface this review with an explanation -- I'm not an intellectual, and if it wasn't for my perverse sense of humor mixed with my young ambition to take as many courses in mathematics as possible, I would probably never have picked this book up off of a friend of mine's shelf.

That being said, I did pick it up. I opened it, and I had to read the first poem three or four times to make sure it was really as good as I thought. Then I moved on to the next, and the next. Long story short, I bugged the book's owner so much, now the book is mine. I have been thouroughly impressed with each successive poem. Since this (poetry) is not my usual thing, I lack the vocabulary to adequately describe this book.

It appealled to me, a (then) computer science and anthropology double major, and it appealed to my friend, who got his doctorate in literature.

Bottom line: No matter who you are, buy this book.

I loved this book. I highly recommend it.
It seems like Alice Fulton can bring anything into a poem and make it work. In these poems, for example, there's Elvis Presley, faked orgasms,TV-reruns. But she's not just grabbing images from popular culture to makethe poems accessible - she's using them, it seems to me, because they're asmuch a part of our world, our ways of knowing and feeling, as classicalmyths, which are also here. (See her fantastic reinterpretation of Daphneand Apollo in the sequence called "Give:") And what's aswonderful to me is the lushness of these poems, the extravagance oflanguage, the way Fulton builds up these crystal-like surfaces from line toline or stanza to stanza and makes them tilt, twist, dance. Alice Fulton'spoems are exciting! ... Read more