Barely Composed: Poems

by Alice Fulton

Overview

"Tackles enduring topics—time, death, love—with a mixture of elegance and agony. . . . All of this blossoms into a dark beauty that makes these poems glisten."—Washington Post

Alice Fulton reimagines the great lyric subjects—time, death, love—and imbues them with fresh urgency and depth. Barely Composed unveils the emotional devastations that follow trauma or grief—extreme states that threaten psyche and language with disintegration. With rare originality, the poems illuminate the deepest suffering and its aftermath of hypervigilance and numbness, the "formal feeling" described by Emily Dickinson.

Elegies contemplate temporal mysteries—the brief span of human/animal life, the nearly eternal existence of stars and nuclear fuel, the enduring presence of the arts—and offer unsparing glimpses of personal loss and cultural suppressions of truth. Under the duress of silencing, whether chosen or imposed, language warps into something uncanny, rich, and profoundly moving. Various forms of inscription—coloring book to redacted document—enact the combustible power of the unsaid.

Though "anguish is the universal language," there also is joy in the reciprocity of gifts and creativity, intellect and intimacy. Gorgeous vintage rhetorics merge with incandescent contemporary registers, and this recombinant linguistic mix gives rise to poems of disarming power. Visionaries—truth tellers, revelators, beholders—offer testimony as beautiful as it is unsettling.

Shimmering with the "good strangeness of poetry," Barely Composed bears witness to love’s complexities and the fragility of existence. In the midst of cruelty, a world in which “the pound is by the petting zoo,” Fulton’s poems embrace the inextinguishable search for goodness, compassion, and "the principles of tranquility."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393352832
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/16/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.40(d)

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.

Table of Contents

Because We Never Practiced With The Escape Chamber 1

I

The Next Big Thing 5

Claustrophilia 7

Triptych For Topological Heart 9

After The Angelectomy 12

Wow Moment 14

II

Forcible Touching 19

Malus Domestica 25

A Tongue-Tie Of Vet Wrap 28

Reckoning Frame 32

III

Personally Engraved 35

Peroral 37

Beaten Into Leaf 38

Custom Clamshell Cases 41

A Thinkable Rampage 43

Black Salve 46

Personal Reactor 47

IV

Sidereal Elegy 55

Still World Nocturne 56

Mahamudra Elegy 58

Active Night 60

Roar Shock 62

Doha Melt-Down Elegy 63

V

"Make It New" 73

A Lightenment On New Year's Eve 75

Daynight, With Mountains Tied Inside 79

You Own It 82

There Are A Few Things I Need To Get 85

My Task Now Is To Solve The Bells 86

End Fetish: An Index Of Last Lines 87

Notes 91

Acknowledgments 93

Editorial Reviews

"Elegant and experimental at once, committed to operating at the freshest tip of the mind, these poems pry through our own readerly boundaries."

Poetry International

"A remarkable, courageous, almost preternatural poetic sensibility."

Los Angeles Review of Books

"At times musical, yes, but at other times a weapon, or a stick to prod open the underbelly of some dark dream…sonorous, rich, and full of surprises."

Rumpus - Casey Patrick

"Fulton removes language from its standard literary and idiomatic proprieties… Her varied techniques are particularly appealing…an alchemy of language and the world beyond the authentic representation of the personal. But she can do expressive representation too."

Daisy Fried

"Fulton sounds at home in the unknown, her music rising like wind whistling between all these ‘finite things.’ You may not mind getting lost with such a guide."

Boston Globe - Michael Andor Brodeur

11/15/2014
In her first volume in ten years (after Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems), Bobbitt National Prize winner Fulton presents poems that spin and teeter, searching for balance like the gyroscope of which she writes. Her subjects are often elegiac: faith ("God, why do you need us to die?"), death ("anguish/ is the universal language"), love ("Love is just the retaliation of light"), and time's passing. Using abundant rhetorical devices—her signature double equal sign as well as redactions, scriptio continua (many words run together), even a fractured villanelle—Fulton offers readers lyrical freshness. And while she considers serious subjects, she is not averse to injecting humor, like the suicide prevention festival that is cancelled because of rain. Sometimes she offers advice—"Avoid the hive mind"—and she juxtaposes science and emotion, using each to clarify neither. Maybe the act of writing, of expression, is, for her, the ultimate conundrum. "To roll the world around a pen// [is] to invent a center." VERDICT An important addition to any poetry collection.—Karla Huston, Appleton, WI

Library Journal