Coloratura on a Silence Found in Many Expressive Systems: Poems - Paperback

by Alice Fulton (Author)

"I was living in a high-maintenance loneliness," Alice Fulton writes of a devastating accident, and her poems express both reverence and impatience as they search for a brightness palpable as the dark. The result is a brilliant coloratura on the senses. Fulton evokes phantom aromas of vanished perfumes, flowers fragrant only at night, and the ozone scent of snow; marvels at velvet paintings and chimerical colors outside the spectrum; and riffs on a mixtape of ambient sounds: applause, clinking glasses, spectral voices on the radio, and the whispers of a mother to her children.

Coloratura On A Silence Found In Many Expressive Systems extends these tactile mysteries to existential questions of invisible miracles, connection, and faith in the face of silence: "By praying you, I create you," the poet informs an elusive God. Reveling in the stunning possibilities of language, Fulton seeks joy to counteract trauma and grief, empathizes with the silent pathos of animals, and finds solace in art, friendship, and the mysterious power of gifts. Without denying suffering, this enthralling volume extends a fervent prayer for gratitude and healing.

Back Jacket

Praise for Alice Fulton

"Alice Fulton...can make you see the space between the stars...Fulton's poems give us access to those spaces between and beyond words, a wilderness where meaning awaits capture. There's beauty and terror to be found in such unmapped terrain, her music rising like the wind whistling between all these 'finite things.'"
-- Michael Andor Brodeur, Boston Globe

"In Alice Fulton's poetry, those charged instances when the literal and the metaphysical (and the sensual and the philosophical) overlap are often mediated...Throughout these kinetically textured lyric poems...the meanings of words shift, contort and refract...Obsessed with identity, yearning and intimacy...they precisely animate these mutable, ever-changing states."
-- Megan Harlan, New York Times Book Review

"The work...tackles enduring topics--time, death, love--with a mixture of elegance and agony...Elegies capture the emptiness of night hours, the difficulty of truth-telling and the fleeting nature of time. All of this blossoms into a dark beauty that makes these poems glisten."
-- Elizabeth Lund, Washington Post