Rotary Devotion was written during a long period witnessing the collapse of democracy and the rise of fascism in the United States. The poems attempt to redeem time by surrendering to imagination, trusting the necessity of that process. As process, imagination changes as it transforms object and subject. The instability motivates the language within poems and between them. No persona is immune to this uncertainty, any attachment can be sacrificed. Likewise, any word might be summoned to the moment shaped by the grammar enough to cohere. In this engagement, the guiding concerns are sensation of the world and how best to love, the former to stay oriented, the latter to justify the effort. Body engages world on behalf of imagination which regards the two with suspicion but interest. However reluctantly, the body lives in the world under constant threat, the sensation of uniqueness in the individual a consciousness of the collective body's crisis as threat to its own survival. What is imagination's responsibility? How can poems be made? Writing poems, fixing words, is a kind of death the poems themselves consider. Imagination is the lively necessary. It moves through parts of the world and absorbs what nurtures it-the stubborn genius of homo erectus, remembered light in a photograph, music found and made, poem after poem considered, eternal weather, imagining history as it happens, what matters and what dies to other forms of matter. These poems offer intimate companionship to the reader's own voice, twin at times, antagonist at others, always a necessary and loving duet sharing genius and awe beyond personal identity which imagination knows as a barrier to love as much as an enticement. Irony is all the solace some poems offer, other times it allows a deeper vision of unity that begins where poems end.

"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.

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."

The words exhilarating, powerful, generous, daring, and enchanting have been used to describe Alice Fulton's poetry. In Sensual Math, her broad-ranging intelligence continues to surprise and electrify. Drenched with the beauties of perception and language, with syntactical stretch and give, Sensual Math embraces areas often excluded from poetry. Drawing upon science, myth, popular culture, feminist theory, and autobiography, Alice Fulton creates an entrancing and important postmodern poetics. In the sequence called "My Last TV Campaign," an advertising executive tries to apply the successful imitative strategies of nature to a context of consumerism. By reimagining the myth of Daphne and Apollo, another sequence dismantles attitudes surrounding rape and the ancient association of woman with nature and man with culture. Daphne becomes a composite of Amelia Earhart, Annie Oakley, Emily Dickinson, and Marianne Moore. A major work by a poet who has been called breathtakingly fluent, blessedly unpredictable, "Sensual Math" figures the world as a blend of Zen and Elvis, calculus and honey. The final triumph is that poems so profound can be so profoundly engaging.

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."

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.

Winner of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, chosen by the Los Angeles Times as one of the Best Books of 2001, and as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

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.

"This may be Fulton's best book: it is at once accessible and ambitious, evasive and informative, consistently curious, and, yes, strongly felt."—Publishers Weekly

"Full of animated, charged poems, Alice Fulton's latest collection sizzles with logophilia and tropes, is blessed with the kind of direct wiring between sensation and language, feeling and form, that strikes first with physical and then with intellectual and emotional wallop. Hers is a poetic sensibility at once remarkably comprehensive and remarkably precise, and felt; her best book so far is possessed of great velocity, great staying-power."—The 2002 Bobbitt Prize Committee (David Baker, Eamon Grennan, and Heather McHugh)

"In Alice Fulton's poetry, those charged instances when the literal and the metaphysical (and the sensual and the philosophical) overlap are often mediated by wordplay—a pun, a double entendre, a witty turn of phrase. The title of her marvelous fifth collection, Felt, is meant to signify both an emotion once experienced [and] the fabric constructed by fibers that are forcibly pressed, rather than woven, together. . . . Throughout these kinetically textured lyric poems—they have varied indentations and line lengths, and are aurally rich with slant rhymes and musical rhythms—the meanings of words shift, contort and refract. . . . In poems obsessed with identity, yearning and intimacy, the power of Fulton's verbal pyrotechnics is that they precisely animate these mutable, ever-changing states."—Megan Harlan, The New York Times Book Review

"Fulton's lyrics travel at startling velocity, flitting through the multiple dimensions of contemporary physics and sensual math (the title of one of her earlier books) in ripples of scintillate diction like god particles. She runs pop culture, literary and political references through her linguistic search engine, locating elliptical emotional contexts for the highly particular elements of obsession. . . . Fulton's poetic intuition is a kind of apperceptive proof—never false . . . —but like the poems in this, her fifth book, . . . crazy-beautiful, expressive, original to a fault."—Carol Muske-Dukes, Los Angeles Times Book Review (A Best Book of 2001)

"Alice Fulton proposes language as felt, a word that refers both to that strangely matted textile—fibers filtered and condensed into unity—and to what Fulton calls in a poem title "The Permeable Past Tense of Feel." In her recently published book Felt , she conjoins the physical and abstract to startling effect, pressing together the majesty of the perceptive act with the ordinariness of experience, and the result is a fabric of complex emotional truths. Fulton's dense and daring work has amazed readers since the beginning."—Eric Lorberer, Rain Taxi Review of Books

"For the last 20 years Fulton has been pushing her poetry into new places, incorporating the language of the new sciences, finding and exploiting the multiple layers of sense within even the most common words, and packing her lines and their breaks with sound and meaning, restless even with the very punctuation of the language. . . . This new book has many of those admirable flourishes that Fulton has been perfecting for several years. But Felt is also a step forward, where many of the hardwon lessons of Fulton's earlier books come together in absolutely moving ways."—Keith Taylor, The Ann Arbor Observer

"Alice Fulton's Felt is a worthy and exciting sequel to Sensual Math and her other previous volumes."—Marta Boswell, The Missouri Review

"Alice Fulton has been purveying new ways of thinking about contemporary poetry and the postmodern since her seminal essay on fractal poetics appeared in 1986. Along with their shimmering surfaces, Fulton's poems go to the heart. They do so with skill displaying a vast, plastic vocabulary of learned borrowings, neologisms, and scientific terms, not to mention such gems as "suasions hidden in the everyday."—Kate Moos, Ruminator Review

Among the best new books due out [in 2001] is one by Alice Fulton. The intensely personal, cerebral poems of Felt feature as an ongoing metaphor the fabric of the title, which is "formed by pressing / fibers till they can't be wrenched apart."—Dennis Loy Johnson, Orlando Sentinel

In "Feeling as a Foreign Language," award-winning poet and critic Alice Fulton considers poetry's uncanny ability to access and recreate emotions so wayward they go unnamed. How does poetry create feeling? What are fractal poetics?
In a series of provocative, beautifully written essays concerning "the good strangeness of poetry," Fulton contemplates the intricacies of a rare genetic syndrome, the aesthetics of complexity theory, and the need for "cultural incorrectness." She also meditates on electronic, biological, and linguistic screens; 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."
Contents
Preamble
I. Process
"Head Notes, Heart Notes, Base Notes"
Screens: An Alchemical Scrapbook
II. Poetics
"Subversive Pleasures"
Of Formal, Free, and Fractal Verse: Singing the Body Eclectic
Fractal Amplifications: Writing in Three Dimensions
III. Powers
"The Only Kangaroo among the Beauty"
Unordinary Passions: Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle
Her Moment of Brocade: The Reconstruction of Emily Dickinson
IV. Praxis
"Seed Ink"
To Organize a Waterfall
V. Penchants
"A Canon for Infidels"
Three Poets in Pursuit of America
The State of the Art
Main Things
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VI. Premises
"The Tongue as a Muscle"
A Poetry of Inconvenient Knowledge