Barely Composed

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In this eagerly awaited collection of new poems—her first in over a decade—Alice Fulton reimagines the great lyric subjects of time, death, and love, imbuing them with fresh urgency and depth. The work unveils the emotional devastations following trauma or grief—extreme states threatening psyche and language with disintegration. With rare originality, the poems illuminate deep suffering and its aftermath of hypervigilance and numbness, echoing Emily Dickinson's "formal feeling." Elegies explore temporal mysteries—human and animal life's brevity, the nearly eternal existence of stars and nuclear fuel, and the enduring presence of the arts—offering unsparing glimpses of personal loss and cultural truths. Under silencing duress, language warps into something uncanny and profoundly moving. Various forms of inscription—coloring book to redacted document—enact the power of the unsaid. While "anguish is the universal language," joy also emerges in the reciprocity of gifts and creativity. Gorgeous vintage rhetorics blend with contemporary registers, creating poems of disarming power. Visionaries—truth tellers and beholders—offer testimony as beautiful as it is unsettling. Shimmering with the "good strangeness of poetry," this collection bears witness to love's complexities and existence's fragility, embracing the inextinguishable search for goodness, compassion, and tranquility amidst cruelty.