In Watchword, William Fuller plots the paths of consciousness with sensitivity and precision. Pivoting on what he has elsewhere called "transfer points almost too elusive to name," his poems shift—sometimes mid-word—between languages of commerce, the natural sciences, and seventeenth-century Neoplatonism (among others). Such moments of exchange elicit both wonder and horror; what emerges is a marriage of heaven and hell. /> />

Sample Poem:

whether transmutation of sweat into air

signifies the middle of unrealized thought

by lease and release of interest

in what we call things

not anxious to be combined

by cold estimation none

to sweep up after the crazed, the shaken

those prepared to sacrifice

through imaginative or sensitive power

the flavor, the sweetness none

could describe except the enflamed