Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems [Paperback]

Alice Fulton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 21, 2005

Highlights from each of Alice Fulton's groundbreaking, prize-winning poetry books.

Over the past twenty years, Alice Fulton has emerged as one of the most brilliant and honored poets of her generation. She is also among the most thrillingly inventive, compassionate, and necessary. Cascade Experiment charts the evolution of a poetics that revises the limits of language, emotion, and thought.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Fulton's first selected (and her seventh collection overall) cements her reputation as a quirky, increasingly challenging assembler of a pleasantly cluttered, 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 (she now teaches at Cornell). 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. Like Heather McHugh and Albert Goldbarth, this 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.
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About the Author

Alice Fulton’s honors include a MacArthur Fellowship and the Editor’s Prize in Fiction. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize anthologies. She lives in Ithaca, New York, and teaches at Cornell University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (November 21, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393327620
• ISBN-13: 978-0393327625
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 6.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #736,517 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Alice Fulton's first fiction collection, The Nightingales of Troy: Connected Stories, was published by W.W. Norton in 2008. Her most recent book of poems is Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems. Felt was awarded the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. This biennial poetry prize is given on behalf of the nation in recognition of the most distinguished book of poetry written by an American and published during the preceding two years. Felt also was selected by the Los Angeles Times as one of the Best Books of 2001 and as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

Fulton has received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, The Michigan Society of Fellows, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has been included in five editions of The Best American Poetry series and in the 10th Anniversary edition, The Best of the Best American Poetry, 1988-1997. She has received Pushcart Prizes in poetry and in fiction, the Bess Hokin award from Poetry, The Elizabeth Matchett Stover Award from Southwest Review, and the Emily Dickinson and Consuelo Ford Awards from the Poetry Society of America. Poems and Fiction also have appeared in Tin House, Poetry, The New Yorker, Parnassus, The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, and many other magazines.

Alice Fulton's ten stories have been collected in The Nightingales of Troy. Two of these stories, "A Shadow Table" and "Queen Wintergreen," have been selected by Alice Sebold and Louise Erdrich for the Best American Short Stories. "Happy Dust," was awarded the Editor's Prize in Fiction by The Missouri Review. "The Real Eleanor Rigby," was selected for the Pushcart Prize XXIX anthology. And "Queen Wintergreen" was also anthologized in Cabbage and Bones: An Anthology of Irish Women's Writing. The Nightingales of Troy was a New & Recommended selection by The Boston Globe; a Discoveries feature by The Los Angeles Times; and a Featured Books interview in The Irish Times. For extensive excerpts from published reviews, please visit alicefulton.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful and Compassionate, October 22, 2004

By 

Joanna Foster (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems (Hardcover)

As I was reading this stunning book, the word "percepticide" kept coming back to me. It was coined by Diana Taylor, and it sums up what Alice Fulton is getting at: that we Americans are mostly blinded by our culture. We're unwilling to look deeply and closely at the things that are most disturbing about our consumerism, our injustice, our cruelty. These poems made me think deeply about these issues: there is a continuing war against women; our culture can be so cold and cruel as to drive human beings to suicide; we have totally desensitized ourselves to the suffering imposed daily on animals; our ability to inflict pain on animals makes it easier for us to dehumanize (think Abu Ghraib) other peoples and inflict pain on them; we must not trust authority; we are infatuated with consumerism; we are destroying our environment; we need to practice compassion. We are the culture, and the culture becomes what it is by our unwillingness to look into ourselves and see how the little things we do every day build the culture. These poems are so carefully crafted, so intricately connected, so cumulative in their stance, and so ethically powerful, that I found it hard to deny the effect they had on me as I read them. That's the reason I'm writing this review (my first). I am so knocked out by the political power of this book that I wanted to spread the word. The cumulative effect of this book is exhilirating. There is so much right now that gives us cause to despair, and Fulton counters it with generosity, openness, humor, and a total absence of preachiness. The extraordinary, startling language in these poems, the way Fulton uses words "to build worlds" made me feel hopeful and energized, like Fulton, "trying to open wide" to the possibilities and hard personal work of creating a just world.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Collection from Cornell's Poet Laureate, November 27, 2004

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems (Hardcover)

CASCADE EXPERIMENT collects a lot of the important pieces from six earlier books by Ithaca's Alice Fulton, who teaches there and has taken the place of A R Ammons as the person people think of when they try to think of a poet at Cornell. Unlike a previous reviewer, I never once thought of the word, "percepticide" when I read through this career-making book, but I agree it's an interesting idea and it would be a good prism through which to examine Alice Fulton's poetry. Even the earliest poetry, where she was writing Plath-like, resonant dirges about her father, had to it an abundance of culture. She is the supremely cultured poet, as Wallace Stevens was to a previous generation (he died in 1955). What we get in CASCADE EXPERIMENT is a willingness to try to listen to the other party, which I do agree, would have been a valuable lesson to learn from Abu Ghraib. Like the training bras she speaks of in her poem, "Cherry Bombs," asking, "What did training bras train/ breasts to do? Hadn't I been told/ when stranger offered dirty candy/ /to say no?" she deplores our culture in which we just don't talk to each other often, and when we do, we mistake for hostility or aggression the other party's point of view. Without other people in our universe, and more important;y their voices, we would be nothing but trophies on the wall--brass emblems of which Fulton writes, in another important poem, "Brass wombs/ they bear transcendence/ without blood, pus, piss, spit, snot, or come./ Like children, they cry, I won." She sees clearly that children can often be cruel, but that it is not the same thing as adult cruelty, the children are still trying to make it into the mirror stage, feeling themselves unappreciated because they see ow way to distinguish themselves not only from their peers, but from the entire surround. I think poets sometimes feel this way as well. In "Art Thou The Thing I Wanted," Fulton tries to distinguish her priorities, to take stock in middle age. "Everything happens to me, I think,/ as anything reminds me of you: the real estate/ /most local, most removed."

She is both local and removed, and also real, like the "real estate" through which the bourgeoise attempts to maintain its grip on society and ontology.

In some ways she is even better than Ammons, who never cared a fig for questions like these.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect Pitch, July 31, 2004

By 

Lisa Rothenberg (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems (Hardcover)

I've read some of Alice Fulton's poems before. So what do I think of her Selected? In all honesty, Fulton makes reading seem worth doing, worth the effort. Her poetry has ideas as well as feelings and vice versa. She has perfect pitch and can be moving (sad) or moving (funny). I read A LOT of contemporary poetry, andafter having read her poems "Some Cool" and "Split the Lark", I can say there is no living poet I respect more. This is the best book of poems I've read in years, the kind that will pay you back with interest every time you return to it.