Alice Fulton

Felt

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