Sensual Math: Poems

Alice Fulton, Sensual Math (Norton, 1995) I'm not entirely sure what to say about Sensual Math. Sometimes you find yourself so wrapped up in a book that you end up with nothing at all in your head; the contents have washed everything else away. The book's twelve standalone poems and two sequences hit pretty much every high note there is to hit. "I'm faking Lamaze and ancient mantras. I'm having new veneers. The dentist talks about a relative who boasted over 364 girlfriends and seduction rooms in every shade. He was in air conditioning and smoked himself to death though he could hold his breath longer than anyone else. 'My role model,' he says." ("Fuzzy Feelings") The sequences are the kinds of things you wonder why no one's ever come up with before, being a simple and awesome as they are. "My Last TV Campaign" gives us an ad exec who comes out of retirement in order to conceive a set of feel-good PSAs for his old company which no one ends up understanding, while "Give: A Sequence Reimagining Daphne and Apollo" gleefully mashes up Greek mythology and postmodern culture, casting Apollo as Fat Elvis (essentially) and Daphne as a mix of role models, from Marianne Moore to Amelia Earhart. It all works wonderfully, which should be no surprise to Alice Fulton fans (of whom there should be scads more than there are): "...Apollo ate nothing but pasta with a dab of porpoise sauce. He despised Cupid for dressing in a blouse slashed to the waist and a tiny gold-lined cape from Nudie's Rodeo Tailors. For the mixed metaphor of his jumpsuit that flared to wedding bells white as a pitcher plant's. Apollo was still exulting over his recent easy listening hit when he happened on Cupid's opening at the Vegas Hilton. 'What right hast thou to sing "My Way," thou imbecilic Fanny Farmer midge larva, thou sewer-water-spitting gargoyle, rednecked bladderwort, dirtbag, greasedome and alleged immortal of a boy,' Apollo fumed..." ("Mail") Subtle, sexy, and always in control of itself, Sensual Math is one not to be missed. Find yourself a copy pronto. **** ½

The title to my review pretty much sums it up. Fulton is a great writer and Sensual Math is definitely worth reading (more than once.) But comparing her to Emily Dickinson is a little outrageous. As poet Li-Young Lee once observed about Emily Dickinson, "you could spend a life time unpacking the meaning from her poems." Fulton is good, but she isn't THAT good!

I read this book after I looked at a list by Matthew Boroson, "humbly amazed." It's a great list, a course in wonder, as he calls it. Of the contemporary poets he recommends, Alice Fulton is the most fearless, and for my money, the best. Who else would begin a poem: "Is beige a castrate of copper, pink, and taste?" ("Fuzzy Feelings") She's wild, but her work is not obscure. Gender-bending, Elvis (!), lace, particle physics... it's all here folks, and never said more richly. I guess the highest praise I can offer is to say that I wish I'd written this book. Yup, I have poem envy. I highly recommend this book.

Let's preface this review with an explanation -- I'm not an intellectual, and if it wasn't for my perverse sense of humor mixed with my young ambition to take as many courses in mathematics as possible, I would probably never have picked this book up off of a friend of mine's shelf.That being said, I did pick it up. I opened it, and I had to read the first poem three or four times to make sure it was really as good as I thought. Then I moved on to the next, and the next. Long story short, I bugged the book's owner so much, now the book is mine. I have been thouroughly impressed with each successive poem. Since this (poetry) is not my usual thing, I lack the vocabulary to adequately describe this book.It appealled to me, a (then) computer science and anthropology double major, and it appealed to my friend, who got his doctorate in literature.Bottom line: No matter who you are, buy this book.

It seems like Alice Fulton can bring anything into a poem and make it work. In these poems, for example, there's Elvis Presley, faked orgasms, TV-reruns. But she's not just grabbing images from popular culture to make the poems accessible - she's using them, it seems to me, because they're as much a part of our world, our ways of knowing and feeling, as classical myths, which are also here. (See her fantastic reinterpretation of Daphne and Apollo in the sequence called "Give:") And what's as wonderful to me is the lushness of these poems, the extravagance of language, the way Fulton builds up these crystal-like surfaces from line to line or stanza to stanza and makes them tilt, twist, dance. Alice Fulton's poems are exciting!