[2] In 1980 she married Hank De Leo and moved to Ithaca, New York, to study poetry under A. R. Ammons, Phyllis Janowitz, Kenneth McClane, and Robert Morgan in Cornell University's Creative Writing Program.
She has often cited Holland's writing on Complex Adaptive Systems as being instrumental in the development of her theory on Fractal Poetics [see Fulton's prose collection].
One senses there is something startling about to be revealed in these poems, and indeed that mystery or tension often resolves in powerful acts of linguistic reckoning, as if a piece of psychological origami were unfolding before our eyes.
One review explained the organizing structure this way: "Etymology breeds metaphor; palladium generates the imagery and energy of the poems, informing them all without necessarily intruding upon them.
It's as though the world itself were endowed with a centrifugal force, enabling the poet to branch out in numerous directions — parallel lines that manage to intersect on their separate paths to infinity.
"[15] Palladium was admired for its "energy and passion for specificity,"[14] its "wit and unpredictable, wildly heterogenous combinations,"[16] the way "surface and substance, style and content, coexist and are often at odds with one another.
Rita Dove in the Washington Post described it as "a wry sendup of academics, featuring a bona-fide poem littered with marginalia from different critics, each with distinct personalities, literary persuasions and handwriting.
"[23] Lawrence Joseph instructs Fulton's reader to "expect a vision of American society — its technological, sexual, class, and religious relationships and context — embodied in language conscientiously intelligent and physical.
"[24] Commenting on how Fulton's treatment of the "real world is never treated only as an exercise in 'realism'" British poet Rodney Pybus notes the "blessedly unpredictable and unconventional" nature of her use of "psychic and social turmoil.
"[26] Powers of Congress contains many examples of her signature use of polyphony and word superclusters[27] which Fulton has described in interviews and in a 1990 essay on her own poetics, "To Organize A Waterfall."
Dorothy Barresi claimed that this work is "what great poetry must do and be" and that "Fulton's poems are like no one else's today‚" with their "on-again, off-again elasticity — a stretching smoothness to some lines, and a snapped back, taut quality to others — that manages to sound both eloquent and scared."
Barresi concluded that "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.
Writing about Sensual Math, Larissa Szporluk asserted that "Fulton's acoustic signals reign, giving the impression that behind their creation lies some kind of unimaginable technology, telepathic jazz, or just plain genius.
"[30] Edward Falco corroborated, "Her poems, spoken out loud or 'heard' in the process of reading, offer a subtle, magnificent jazz: a music for the intellect, felt on the tongue and in the body, resonating in the mind.
[32] Writing about Felt in The New York Times Book Review, Megan Harlan also commented on how Fulton's poems are "aurally rich with slant rhymes and musical rhythms."
"[34] Selected from all poetry books published in the United States in 2000 and 2001, Felt was praised by the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Award committee as "Full of animated, charged poems."
The statement also noted that Felt sizzles with logophilia and tropes, is blessed with the kind of direct wiring between sensation and language, feeling and form, that strikes first with physical and then with intellectual and emotional wallop.
"[36] What sets The Nightingales of Troy apart from so many other precocious debut collections is Fulton's knack for the ineffable, for creating stories that are more than the sum of their intricately assembled parts.
[37]Donna Seaman notes that "Fulton displays extraordinary verve in the originality of the predicaments she creates for her irresistible characters, her evocation of the majesty of the land and the rise and decline of the town, and her ravishingly inventive language" and that she draws "brilliantly on the vernacular and ambience of each decade.
[47] Camille Paglia also finds "heavy sprung rhythms ... reminiscent of the poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins" and that Fulton's "ecstatic techniques" are deployed "for far earthier and more carnal purposes.
A third essay titled "Fractal Poetics: Adaptation and Complexity" was published in 2005 in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (UK) with this summary: In the 1980s, American poets argued over the validity of free verse.
The writings of John H. Holland offer examples of open, exploratory and inclusive complex adaptive systems that lack a centre, hierarchy or equilibrium.
Physicist Karen Barad's conceptualisation of 'agential realism' provides added dimension to fractal poetics by offering a model for locating meaning in the space between traditional dualisms.
She sees "gooey gobs of / process painted in," and notes Mitchell's knifework, which has "left some gesso showing through, / a home for lessness that— / ... / is a form of excess."
This paradoxical excess of absence describes a characteristic feature in Fulton's work, here and in earlier books — a lavish and roiling expenditure of imagery and wordplay that draws attention to the means by which any representational illusion of plenitude is sustained.
Where Dickinson makes the dash key to the rhythms and expression of her poetry, Fulton introduces a new sign of punctuation that she calls 'a bride / after the recessive threads in lace' [= =].
This double-equal sign, which 'might mean immersion,' is 'the unconsidered // mortar' between bricks; it makes 'visible the acoustic signals / of things about to flame,' 'hinging one phrase to the next,' throwing the reader into the same kind of adventurous uncertainty as Dickinson's dash.Miller goes on to say, "For both poets, this interest in hinges, in connections, in incongruities and contiguities reveals itself in verbal and syntactical structures as well as in themes.
"[66] Writing about the double-equal sign, Lynn Keller commented, Her inventive work, which stretches the linguistic, tonal, vocal, and emotional range of contemporary lyric, points ultimately to resources that lie between recognized categories, in liminal states, and at the cultural margins as offering hope for significant social and aesthetic change.
Gabriel Mckee, comments that the poem "contains this compelling passage: Because truths we don't suspect have a hard time making themselves felt, as when thirteen species of whiptail lizards composed entirely of females stay undiscovered due to bias against such things existing, we have to meet the universe halfway.
"[70] The editors of 20th Century Poetics point to "active enjambments" in Fulton's work "that make words do double duty as different parts of speech.