Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems - Softcover

Fulton, Alice

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393327620 ISBN 13: 9780393327625

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Alice Fulton’s honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Fulton is the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English at Cornell University and lives in Ithaca, New York.

From Publishers Weekly

Fulton's first selected (and her seventh collection overall) cements her reputation as a quirky, increasingly challenging assembler of a pleasantly cluttered, pluralistic, kaleidoscopic world. Grounded in the pathos of personal lyric, Fulton's early offerings-Dance Script with Electric Ballerina (1983) and Palladium (1986)-already showed the range for which she became known, roping in subjects from "the wet/ storeways of Graytown, U.S.A." to Isaac Newton, Emily Dickinson, ice-fishing huts and "Aerobia, Goddess of the Body." Other poems took on the grim landscapes of Michigan, where Fulton long lived (she now teaches at Cornell). Zipping from fact to emotion and back again, Fulton's lines mirrored her thoughts' abrupt stops and new starts, "tipping and flirting/ with seldom-seen surfaces." Longer poems and later books took better advantage of Fulton's polymathic bent, offering opalescent disquisitions on two or three topics at once: Felt (2001), her strongest yet, staged a parade of white and off-white objects, from Dickinson's dress to Fulton's own castoffs to "emollients made of mammal fat," weaving around its museum-like displays an ambitious meditation on reticence, art, death and obstinate eternity. Though Fulton tells us that "The natural is what/ poetry contests," her gift for phrasemaking lets her sound spontaneous even in her most surprising claims. Like Heather McHugh and Albert Goldbarth, this midcareer poet wins, and will go on winning, plaudits for her intellectual agility, for the stamina of her book-length projects and for the warm ethic at their core.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0393327620
• ISBN 13: 9780393327625
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 218