Coloratura On A Silence Found In Many Expressive Systems: Poems - Softcover

Fulton, Alice

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1324074698 ISBN 13: 9781324074694

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2024

Synopsis

A vibrant, kaleidoscopic improvisation on the broken body and questing spirit, from "one of the wisest and most insightful poets in the country" (Ron Charles, Washington Post Book Club).

"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.

About this title

About the Author

Alice Fulton is the author of ten books. Her honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. She lives in central New York.

From the Back Cover

Praise for Alice Fulton

"Alice Fulton…can make you see the space between the stars…Fulton’s poems give us access to those spaces between and beyond words, a wilderness where meaning awaits capture. There’s beauty and terror to be found in such unmapped terrain, her music rising like the wind whistling between all these ‘finite things.’”
― Michael Andor Brodeur, Boston Globe

"In Alice Fulton’s poetry, those charged instances when the literal and the metaphysical (and the sensual and the philosophical) overlap are often mediated…Throughout these kinetically textured lyric poems…the meanings of words shift, contort and refract…Obsessed with identity, yearning and intimacy…they precisely animate these mutable, ever-changing states."
― Megan Harlan, New York Times Book Review

"The work…tackles enduring topics―time, death, love―with a mixture of elegance and agony…Elegies capture the emptiness of night hours, the difficulty of truth-telling and the fleeting nature of time. All of this blossoms into a dark beauty that makes these poems glisten."
― Elizabeth Lund, Washington Post

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1324074698
• ISBN 13: 9781324074694
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144