In her essay "To Organize a Waterfall" Alice Fulton describes the central concern of her poetry as "an exploration of mind." The phrase hints at the paradox of Fulton's work: her poems are at once deeply personal and defiantly abstract. Her implicit subject is the workings of the poetic imagination, the way poetry emerges from the mind's web of associations, stimulated by memory, experience, and the seductions of popular culture. She notes the central role of random associations in her compositional method: "The quirk, the oddity, the extreme, the line where the language tilts, can be the most valuable facet of a poem. They are the linguistic equivalents of genetic 'point mutations': variants produced by small changes in an organism's chromosomes." As the poem emerges from the imagination, it resembles a waterfall in which each idea incites the next and the form of the poem "is based on...