In this groundbreaking collection Alice Fulton weds her celebrated linguistic freshness to a fierce emotional depth. Felt a fabric made of tangled fibers becomes a metaphor for the interweavings of humans animals and planet. But Felt is also the past tense of feel. This is a book of emotions both ordinary and untoward: the shadings of humiliation obsession love and loneliness as well as states so subtle they have yet to be named. Reticent and passionate elliptical yet available Fulton s poems consider flaws and failure touching and not touching. They are fascinated with proximity: the painter s closeness to the canvas the human kinship with animals the fan s nearness to the star. Privacy the opening and closing of doors is at the heart of these poems that sing the forms of solitude-the meanings and feelings of virginity the single-mindedness of fetishism the tragedy of suicide. Rather than accept the world as given Fulton encounters invisible assumptions with magnitude and grace. Hers is a poetry of inconvenient knowledge in which the surprises of enlightenment can be cruel as well as kind. Felt a deeply imagined work at once visceral and cerebral illuminates the possibilities of twenty-first century poetry.