Sensual Math: Poems [Hardcover]

Alice Fulton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1995

The words exhilarating, powerful, generous, daring, and enchanting have been used to describe Alice Fulton's poetry. In Sensual Math, her broad-ranging intelligence continues to surprise and electrify. Drenched with the beauties of perception and language, with syntactical stretch and give, Sensual Math embraces areas often excluded from poetry. Drawing upon science, myth, popular culture, feminist theory, and autobiography, Alice Fulton creates an entrancing and important postmodern poetics.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In her brilliant fourth collection, Fulton frequently echoes Emily Dickinson ("Because life's too short to blush/ I keep my blood tucked in"), suggesting in many ways that she may be Dickinson's post-modern heir. In a complex metaphorical alchemy, Fulton blends Elvis and orchids, TV ads and Greek mythology, sculpting these elements on the page with controlled language and her mastery of the lyric. "My Last TV Campaign: A Sequence" links commercials, poetry and theories of Darwin, concluding that "the deep shape of everything is?/ tranvestism." Shape-shifting in nature and culture is cast in terms of gender in the long (a third the length of the book) final section, "Give: A Sequence Reimaginging Daphne and Apollo." Here Fulton also employs word play and even an invented grammatical sign ("==," described variously as "dash to the max" and "sutures that dissolve into the self") to spin the myth of a spirited, absurdist, often hilarious, contemporary life. Images and themes reiterate and reform in these energetic and unassailably intelligent poems, so that the collection, taken as a whole, helps demystify Fulton's more visionary, difficult work.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Fulton, winner of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, reveals humor, intelligence, and an exquisite sense of language in her fourth collection. "For immersion see/'passion between.' See/opposite of serene. For synonym and homonym/see 'rapt' and 'wrapped.'" She also expresses a quirkiness that is peculiarly her own, partly stemming from her choice of subjects: how many writers poetize on advertising or on pigs about to be slaughtered? Fulton is best at circling around her subject before hitting home: "remember a quiver is a fist/of arrows and the arrows' case, their clothes./It is the weapon and the tremor,/the cause and the effect." To experience her sense of the absurd, check out some of her titles: "Elvis from the Waist Up," "A Little Heart to Heart with the Horizon," and "Bobbins, Formerly Bones." Almost all her poems celebrate change. Some poems are less successful, but Fulton's work could never be called dull or unintelligent. "What causes less comfort/than wonder?" she asks in "Wonder Bread." The answer: her poems. Recommended for most collections.?Doris Lynch, Bloomington P.L., Ind.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 128 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc; 1st edition (April 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393037509
• ISBN-13: 978-0393037500
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,128,525 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

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I loved this book. I highly recommend it., October 25, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Sensual Math (Paperback)

It seems like Alice Fulton can bring anything into a poem and make it work. In these poems, for example, there's Elvis Presley, faked orgasms, TV-reruns. But she's not just grabbing images from popular culture to make the poems accessible - she's using them, it seems to me, because they're as much a part of our world, our ways of knowing and feeling, as classical myths, which are also here. (See her fantastic reinterpretation of Daphne and Apollo in the sequence called "Give:") And what's as wonderful to me is the lushness of these poems, the extravagance of language, the way Fulton builds up these crystal-like surfaces from line to line or stanza to stanza and makes them tilt, twist, dance. Alice Fulton's poems are exciting!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poem Envy, July 28, 2004

By 

Barry Shiner (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sensual Math (Paperback)

I read this book after I looked at a list by Matthew Boroson, "humbly amazed." It's a great list, a course in wonder, as he calls it. Of the contemporary poets he recommends, Alice Fulton is the most fearless, and for my money, the best. Who else would begin a poem: "Is beige a castrate of copper, pink, and taste?" ("Fuzzy Feelings") She's wild, but her work is not obscure. Gender-bending, Elvis (!), lace, particle physics... it's all here folks, and never said more richly. I guess the highest praise I can offer is to say that I wish I'd written this book. Yup, I have poem envy. I highly recommend this book.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, shimmering, funky and fantastic, September 30, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Sensual Math (Paperback)

Sensual Math is an exquisite book. Alice Fulton's love affair with language is thrilling; it's also important. Sensual Math can make you believe (again) in the power of every syllable, and not to "capture" or "master" experience, but to give ourselves up to the hearbeat of the world.