Alice Fulton’s ‘Feeling as a Foreign Language’: Poetry and Linguistic Displacement

Description

Graywolf, paperback

Publication Date: August 22, 2019

Publisher Marketing: In Feeling as a Foreign Language, award-winning poet and critic Alice Fulton considers poetry’s uncanny ability to access and recreate emotions so wayward they go unnamed. How does poetry create feeling? What are fractal poetics?
In a series of provocative, beautifully written essays concerning “the good strangeness of poetry,” Fulton contemplates the intricacies of a rare genetic syndrome, the aesthetics of complexity theory, and the need for “cultural incorrectness.” She also meditates on electronic, biological, and linguistic screens; falls in love with an outrageous 17th-century poet; argues for a Dickinsonian tradition in American letters; and calls for a courageous poetics of “inconvenient knowledge.”

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