Alice Fulton

-- Sarah Cohen

Alice Fulton has suggested that poetry is a "model of the way the world works".

Her poetry has been described as "intricately crafted, yet expansive — even majestic — in its scope and vision. One senses there is something startling about to be revealed in these poems, and indeed that mystery or tension often resolves in powerful acts of linguistic reckoning, as if a piece of psychological origami were unfolding before our eyes."

The editors of Twentieth-Century American Poetry suggest that "In her drive to freshen poetic diction, avoid cliche and sentimentality, and create 'skewed domains‚' in her poetry, Fulton has distinguished herself as one of the most original American poets writing today. She has succeeded in challenging not only assumptions about gender roles, but also the assumptions underlying current modes of poetry such as the autobiographical, first-person lyric or the experimental 'Language poem.'"

In his introduction to Fulton's first book, Dance Script With Electric Ballerina, W. D. Snodgrass reads Fulton's poetry as a rare example of logopoeia ("the dance of the intellect among words") and writes that "we are always engaged by ... the sense of linguistic virtuosity ... a constant delight ... in language textures, the every-shifting shock and jolt of an electric surface."

Newsday, called it an "extremely impressive poetic debut‚" and a Boston Herald reviewer wrote, "Reading her poems is something like listening to a set of the most spirited and peculiar jazz: you must sharpen your spirit to be moved by what is uncanny and rare."

While most critical response to this debut volume was positive, conservative critics were "more guarded, or even catty."

Her second collection consolidated the "polyphonic textures," shifts in diction, and signature enjambments that have become hallmarks of her poetry.

Palladium is structured in six parts, each focused on the etymology of "palladium" with the trope carried to Ellen Foscue Johnson's palladium photographic print on the cover.

One review explained the organizing structure this way: "Etymology breeds metaphor; palladium generates the imagery and energy of the poems, informing them all without necessarily intruding upon them. The organizing principle of an Alice Fulton poem allows for cohesiveness yet is not so narrow or restrictive as to inhibit the flow of associations and ideas. It's as though the world itself were endowed with a centrifugal force, enabling the poet to branch out in numerous directions — parallel lines that manage to intersect on their separate paths to infinity."

Sven Birkerts, noting Fulton's "irrepressible inventiveness" and "startling juxtapositions," named this an "aesthetic of profusion."

Critics praised these "compressed poems of great texture and inventiveness," as "prepossessing and formidable," "hardwon and solid."