Barely Composed: Poems


Book Description

"Fulton is exactly the kind of poet Shelley had in mind when he said 'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.' " —Verse In this eagerly awaited collection of new poems—her first in over a decade—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."




Feeling as a Foreign Language


Book Description

In Feeling as a Foreign Language, Alice Fulton considers poetry's uncanny ability to access and recreate emotions so wayward they go unnamed. Fulton contemplates topics ranging from the intricacies of a rare genetic syndrome to fractals from the aesthetics of complexity theory to the need for "cultural incorrectness." Along the way, she falls in love with an outrageous 17th century poet, argues for a Dickinsonian tradition in American letters, and calls for a courageous poetics of inconvenient knowledge.




Barely Composed


Book Description

"Fulton is exactly the kind of poet Shelley had in mind when he said 'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.' " —Verse In this eagerly awaited collection of new poems—her first in over a decade—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."




Powers of Congress


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. 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.




Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems


Book Description

Alice Fulton is one of the most brilliant and honored poets of her generation. She is also among the most compassionate and necessary. Cascade Experiment revises the limits of language, emotion, and thought.




Voyage of the Sable Venus


Book Description

This National Book Award-winning debut poetry collection is a "powerfully evocative" (The New York Review of Books) meditation on the black female figure through time. Robin Coste Lewis's electrifying collection is a triptych that begins and ends with lyric poems meditating on the roles desire and race play in the construction of the self. In the center of the collection is the title poem, "Voyage of the Sable Venus," an amazing narrative made up entirely of titles of artworks from ancient times to the present—titles that feature or in some way comment on the black female figure in Western art. Bracketed by Lewis's own autobiographical poems, "Voyage" is a tender and shocking meditation on the fragmentary mysteries of stereotype, juxtaposing our names for things with what we actually see and know. A new understanding of biography and the self, this collection questions just where, historically, do ideas about the black female figure truly begin—five hundred years ago, five thousand, or even longer? And what role did art play in this ancient, often heinous story? Here we meet a poet who adores her culture and the beauty to be found within it. Yet she is also a cultural critic alert to the nuances of race and desire—how they define us all, including her own sometimes painful history. Lewis's book is a thrilling aesthetic anthem to the complexity of race—a full embrace of its pleasure and horror, in equal parts.




Sensual Math


Book Description

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




Coming of Age as a Poet


Book Description

With characteristic precision, authority, and grace, Vendler helps readers to appreciate the conception and practice of poetry as she explores four poets and their first "perfect" works. 4 halftones.




The Poem That Never Ends


Book Description

Literary Nonfiction. Sparked by the only two letters--out of over a hundred-that López Medin's mother saved from her own mother in Paraguay, THE POEM THAT NEVER ENDS weaves together poems and family photos to explore the fragmentation of time, memory, and mother-child relationships. Fragments, family hearing impairments, ripped-up letters, and living and writing between languages point to the inescapable holes in language, troubling the notion of a finite utterance. Layering elements of painting, cinema, and the elusive three dimensions of theater into the weave, THE POEM THAT NEVER ENDS traces a sequence of mothers-López Medin's mother, her mother's mother, herself as a mother-in a porous, restless gesture toward what's never fully grasped.




Fire Season


Book Description

Poetry. California Interest. Winner of the Berkshire Prize for a First or Second Book of Poetry. Occasioned by the birth of a first child and originally spoken aloud into a digital audio recorder on the poet's long commute between the art museum where he worked and his home in a neighborhood burned in the Witch Creek Fire of 2007, each of the poems in Patrick Coleman's first book resists the confusions of twenty-first-century parenthood, marriage, art, and commerce. By turns conversational and anxious, metaphysical and self-mocking, celebratory yet permeated by an awareness of life's flickering ephemerality, FIRE SEASON is a search for gratitude among reasons to be afraid--and proof that a person can pass through the fires and come out the other side alive.