Alice Fulton | Reviews of Cascade Experiment

Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems

W.W. Norton, 2004

Alice Fulton is not a safe poet; she's a daring, ambitious, and risk-taking one, and, as the magnificent pieces gathered together in Cascade Experiment so eloquently and scintillatingly demonstrate, she has been so throughout her lengthy and deservedly successful career. Time and again Fulton has proven herself willing, unlike so many of her contemporaries, to take chances in her work. Poetry as a whole would be much enlivened if poets everywhere could take a cue from her and engage in experimentation of their own.

Kathleen Rooney
Harvard Review

[Fulton’s poetics] challenges the conventional wisdom among many poets that the content of a poem is less important than its form. In practice, Fulton has created a poetic style that is remarkably "about things," in the sense that her poems explore their overt subject matter deeply and uphold their convictions with rigor. Cascade Experiment, a new selection of poems culled from her previous five books of poetry, amply demonstrates not only Fulton's broad range of interests but also her continual and evolving sense of how to use the most seemingly insignificant details to illuminate the nuances of difficult moral ideas.

Sarah Cohen
The Atlantic Unbound

At the heart of her politically powerful and linguistically complicated poems is a questioning speaker attempting to make sense, to be a good person, to live right. This voice is most often emphasized at the close of the poems. These endings illustrate not just a questioning speaker who is willing, over several collections, to end her poems with heart-rending flux, but also an unpredictable movement from line to line, and a wordplay that transforms the meaning unexpectedly, so that we readers are surprised out of the familiar and into a heightened awareness.

Sarah Vap, Rain Taxi Review of Books

The first thing that strikes any reader new to Alice Fulton’s poetry is the authority of her rhythm. Almost brazenly, the power of her line announces that neither rhyme nor formal meter are necessary to the energetic progress of her chant — and it is a chant, a strange halting music that never blurs or gasps for breath. The pauses and caesuras are brilliantly placed and give the impression that a never-ceasing voice, relentless and sure, has all the force it needs to carry ideas and impressions as far as they dare to go. Enjambment often threatens to turn poetry into prose, but Fulton uses it to sharpen her phrasing, which in turn is remarkably sure and strengthened by the vividness of her imagery.

Peter Brier
Magills Literary Annual

Nabokov is one of Alice Fulton’s literary mentors: The sheer delight in language’ subterfuges, the knotty avenues of recollections and desire, the human need for ‘significance’ that forms narratives even where there are none — these themes are the very bone and gristle of Fulton’s prodigal, energetic poetry.

Rita Dove
Washington Post Book World

A cascade experiment is a chain of causality, of interconnected events. The phrase is an apt title for this selection of poems by Alice Fulton, whose similies and metaphors leap from science to pop culture to lived experience.... These freewheeling associations reflect a thematic interest in both linkage and separateness.... Fulton is fully aware that such connectedness does not necessarily lead to a cozy feeling of oneness with animal, vegetable, and mineral. The subject of borders relates to another of Fulton’s recurring themes, that of the relation between nature and artifice, particularly in the context of gender.... Fulton handles these weighty themes with grace, making pointed use of humor as she startles the reader into active thought.

Julia Bninski
Virginia Quarterly Review

Fulton’s first selected (and her seventh collection overall) cements her reputation as a quirky, increasingly challenging assembler of a 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.... 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.... [T]his 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.

Publishers Weekly

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