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Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems by Alice Fulton, W. W. Norton & Company, 2004, $24.95 cloth, ISBN 0393059286.
In "On Writing Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems," Alice Fulton explains that she named this latest collection after a scientific phenomenon that is essentially "a domino effect, a waterfall of causality in which one event triggers and affects the next." The experience of reading her work is like the feeling of falling into awareness, being pulled inexorably down the page until we arrive at a particular meaning or epiphany, having made illuminating discoveries along the way.
Each time Fulton sets one of her poetic experiments in motion, we find ourselves tumbling through assorted fresh and surprising landscapes, "through subdivisions trim and brown as bouillon cubes," places where "the land is neither dramatically flat/nor high, where it snows enough/to keep the world/the bitter white of aspirin" and through "that existential twilight/found in rooms lit only by TV."
Gathering together as it does work from her 1983 debut, Dance Script With Electric Ballerina, up through her most recent collection, 2001's critically acclaimed Felt, Cascade Experiment initially greets the reader almost like a set of...