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." Contents Preamble I. Process"Head Notes, Heart Notes, Base Notes" Screens: An Alchemical Scrapbook II. Poetics"Subversive Pleasures" Of Formal, Free, and Fractal Verse: Singing the Body Eclectic Fractal Amplifications: Writing in Three Dimensions III. Powers"The Only Kangaroo among the Beauty" Unordinary Passions: Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle Her Moment of Brocade: The Reconstruction of Emily Dickinson IV. Praxis"Seed Ink" To Organize a Waterfall V. Penchants"A Canon for Infidels" Three Poets in Pursuit of America The State of the Art Main Things ri0VI. Premises"The Tongue as a Muscle" A Poetry of Inconvenient Knowledge