Feeling as a Foreign Language

"The better part of fairness is the willingness to move toward what is given rather than impose one's own aesthetic on a book. This approach--a sympathetic leaning toward the work coupled with patient rereading--is the one I've tried to realize." In this collection, poet Alice Fulton looks at her craft from a critic's perspective, exploring the "good strange or eccentric" world of postmodern poetry. In order to do this, Fulton has divided her book into five parts; the first, "Process," explores the multitudes of filters that stand between the writer/reader and the work--everything from the computer screen to that judgmental internal editor "invested with the power of entry and exclusion." "Poetics" investigates the forms postmodern poetry takes, supporting the "free and fractal" with an in-depth examination of prosody, linguistics, and even the relationships between quantum physics and poetry. In "Powers" Fulton takes a look at two misunderstood poets: the 18th-century Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, and the 19th-century Emily Dickinson--both considered "eccentric" in their own times. "Praxis" is a meditation on the author's own work, and she follows it up with the final section, "Penchants," which contains three essay-reviews on a number of modern poets. Anyone interested in the state of postmodern poetry will find much food for thought in Alice Fulton's Feeling As a Foreign Language. --Margaret Prior