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"She is an ambitious, powerful poet.... Her themes—like those of her great exemplar, Dickinson—are the sacred and the profane.... In the masterful title poem, 'Powers Of Congress,' she invites us to this paradox, detailing experiences of stress and force in the ironies of daily life.... She is a thematic gambler of the best sort. Her poems are daring and broad."
—Eavan Boland, Partisan Review
"Her merest glance is catalytic, a vehicle for connection.... No one matches her ability to perform a kind of marginal sneak attack, a slipping-in of subject, substance, sound—to insinuate the unknown into the known, to fracture, fuse, repair.... Fulton is embarked on a project to redefine or recreate poetry according to the multiforms of experience and intellect, rather than to shape experience by modeling it on a received poetic vision. Powers Of Congress is a rigorous, generous book, by one of the finest young poets in the country."
—David Baker, Poetry
"There's an air of recklessness that crackles through Alice Fulton's poetry, an electric audacity that powers both her sound and her sense.... Fulton transcribes what might admiringly be called a poetics of contemporary disquiet, jagged and jazzy wordcraft that simultaneously entertains bravado and doubt, irreverence and devotion. These are poems that binge not just on language but on lexicons and argots, poems that lift their riffs not only from the deep wells of the American vernacular but from the streamlined vaults of newfangled technology and scientific determinism.... In Powers Of Congress Alice Fulton shows she's learned a thing or two about levitation."
—David Barber, Hungry Mind Review
Powers Of Congress exhibits, in dazzling language and complex rhetorical structures, a passionate curiosity about all aspects of modern American life. With a linguistic vigor and intellectual depth that are rare in contemporary poetry, Fulton illuminates such fundamental subjects as war, religion, gender, our obsession with bodily or mechanistic perfection, and the perplexing chasm of consciousness that lies between the "natural" world and what we humans do. These poems are equally daring in their formal inventions; their textual layerings range from acrostics to a dramatic monologue inscribed with readers' responses.
Sven Birkerts, in the Boston Review, called Fulton a "prodigiously gifted poet," and in Powers Of Congress Fulton more than meets that claim. This thrilling collection, destined to exert a wide influence upon contemporary poetics, will surely intoxicate all those who love the erotic involvement of language with thought.
Powers Of Congress was first published by David R. Godine in 1990. Alice Fulton's other books include Felt (W.W. Norton, 2001), winner of the 2002 Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, a Best Book of 2001 selection by the LA Times, and a finalist for the LA Times Book Award; Sensual Math; Palladium, winner of the 1985 National Poetry Series and the 1987 Society of Midland Authors Award; and Dance Script With Electric Ballerina, winner of The 1982 Associated Writing Programs Award. A collection of prose, Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry, was published by Graywolf Press in 1999. Alice 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. and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. 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 a Pushcart Prize, 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 also have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, Parnassus, The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, and many other magazines. She is currently Professor of English at Cornell University.
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