Over the Past Twenty Years, Alice Fulton has emerged as one of the most brilliant and honored poets of her generation. She is also among the most thrillingly inventive, compassionate, and necessary. Cascade Experiment, a selection from five books, charts the evolution of a poetics that revises the limits of language, emotion, and thought. Few poets have Fulton's prodigious range; few have been so consistently and successfully intrepid in their metamorphoses. Writing of "the great integrative force" of Fulton's poems, A. R. Ammons praised their "central music as fine as feeling, as spiritual as motion." C. D. Wright calls her "a radiant poet"; Rita Dove finds her work "enchantingly dangerous"; Mark Doty says her "startling cascades make sublime sense." Cascade Experiment begins with poems of tough love and lyric edge from Dance Script with Electric Ballerina, a first book whose fresh music revitalized American poetry. It includes charming polymath poems from Palladium, a linguistic feast now regarded as a milestone of postmodern poetics. It offers the mind on fire behind Powers of Congress, a book of questing spiritual intelligence and formal grace. And it includes selections from Sensual Math, a collection that ripped through cultural cliches and unsettled complacency as it drew upon the uncanny loveliness of science. The volume ends with poems from Felt, winner of the Bobbitt Prize given by the Library of Congress on behalf of the nation, a book praised by the New York Times for its "marvelous ... poems obsessed with identity, yearning and intimacy." Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems is an event in the life of the English language. Book jacket.

Alice Fulton's awards include a fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the 2002 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. Her poems have appeared in six editions of The Best American Poetry series. She lives in Ithaca, New York, and teaches at Cornell University