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nick_jenkins's review against another edition
5.0
"On a thinkable rampage, on a tear, I grow my passions into a candle."
Like some of the most creative, most vibrantly strange poets in U.S. literature—Dickinson and Ashbery, for two—Fulton teases playfulness from paradox. Here, in this line, we don't expect to find "candle" at its end. A candle seems all too wan, too timid to be "grown" into; it comports awkwardly with "rampage." "Torch" or "pyre"—incidentally, both words also come up elsewhere in this book—would seem more natural, more fitting here.
Fulton, again like Ashbery and Dickinson, frequently uses both the imperative command and the rhetorical question to mix the reader into the swirl of the poem; we are suddenly ensnared, but we don't know how tightly, and we have no idea where we are. It is a delirious, delicious (twice in this book Fulton mentions "mouthfeel" and tongues loom large in several poems) experience.
Like some of the most creative, most vibrantly strange poets in U.S. literature—Dickinson and Ashbery, for two—Fulton teases playfulness from paradox. Here, in this line, we don't expect to find "candle" at its end. A candle seems all too wan, too timid to be "grown" into; it comports awkwardly with "rampage." "Torch" or "pyre"—incidentally, both words also come up elsewhere in this book—would seem more natural, more fitting here.
Fulton, again like Ashbery and Dickinson, frequently uses both the imperative command and the rhetorical question to mix the reader into the swirl of the poem; we are suddenly ensnared, but we don't know how tightly, and we have no idea where we are. It is a delirious, delicious (twice in this book Fulton mentions "mouthfeel" and tongues loom large in several poems) experience.
alylentz's review
3.0
These poems are similar in style and theme, and in that sense they make sense as a collection, but some of these really pulled me in and spoke to me while others I couldn't be bothered to try and make heads or tails of. I especially connected with poems in parts IV and V ("Sidereal Elegy", "Daynight, With Mountains Tied Inside", "You Own It"), but on the whole, I think this book was too opaque for me.
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