Passionately curious, she knows about such things as echo location and complicated gymnastic maneuvers, Elizabethan invective and African-American spirituals, dirty rhymes and palladium, babytalk and pop songs. About sensuality and math. Her poems compose a gallimaufry, a delicious tossed salad, a farrago of work, full of hybrid brides, for instance, and figurative hippogriffs. The result is a poetic version of the change-up pitch or a 5.6 earthquake, rhythms that leave us repeatedly feeling uncertain, off balance. Fulton writes with fiery intelligence, and unapologetically so, for it is in the acts of thinking and rethinking that this poet believes we stave off the brute world's numbing assault.
Some geometers say that mathematics is the science of pattern.
But it is also the science of sameness and difference, the science that governs the different guises the same thing may take. One senses that this collection of poems, in its music, its syntax, and its story, is grappling with the delicious algebra of connectors. Fulton offers us wonder. Yet, this symbol also serves as a summary device that draws together Fulton's complex themes. The music of Fulton's poetry is one of its particular strengths.