Felt

<p>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.</p>