Careful

"Careful is an astonishing, tightly braided book. Riffing on Mad Men and Punky Brewster, Blue Velvet, the WWF and Rescue 911, Katie Fuller's eclectic and insightful poems hum with undercurrents of danger, digging deep into themes of survival, sexual exploitation, pain, and violence," says the Anhinga Prize Judge Erika Meitner of the 2022 winner. Examining her own cultural consumption through the years, through topics as innocuous as children's programming and as high-brow as independent cinema, the speaker can't turn away from the horrors and sublimities of the digital age: "I AM DEATHLY AFRAID OF THE INTERNET/AND I AM ON IT ALL THE TIME." Adds poet Kerri Webster "Fuller looks unflinchingly, yet doesn't resolve to abandon us in this bold collection." In a media-saturated world, Careful seeks the hope that might lie in language, and love, to survive and create, to "consult the bridge to memory presented as fact." Meitner concludes. "The moral of the story is the television pulses,' writes Fuller, and these poems pulse, too, with corporeality and snappy dialogue, with music and heart, and with a restless lyric intelligence that reminds us: 'not everyone gets saved.'   KATIE FULLER is a poet from western Maine, and the author of the chapbooks Valve and The Greenwood Cemetery. She studied poetry at the University of Maine and Boise State University. For most of the past decade, she wrote and taught in Idaho, and now resides in New England. Careful is her first full-length collection.   "Careful is an astonishing, tightly braided book that invites us to ruminate on the ways in which we interact with media, and how it, in turn, shapes our consciousness. Riffing on Mad Men and Punky Brewster, Blue Velvet and WWF and Rescue 911, Katie Fuller's eclectic and insightful poems hum with undercurrents of danger, digging deep into themes of survival, sexual exploitation, pain, and violence when it comes to moving through the world in a female body in the 21st century. 'The moral of the story is the television pulses,' writes Fuller, and these poems pulse, too, with corporeality and snappy dialogue, with music and heart, and with a restless lyric intelligence that reminds us: 'not everyone gets saved." - Erika Meitner, 2022 Judge, Anhinga Prize for Poetry "In Careful, Katie Fuller isn't afraid to show you her search history, or is afraid but does it anyway in this bold collection. 'I have trash in those dumpsters,' she tells us, and who doesn't? What Careful builds is not just a personal but a collective archive, a Wayback Machine that folds in Blue Velvet, blueberry harvests, pro wrestling, embodiment, a war we've collectively pretended to forget, cancer clusters, mothers and grandmothers. Fuller eschews 'euphoric recall' and looks unflinchingly, yet doesn't resolve to abandon us. 'Oh what forgotten patron saint will save us/how will we get out,' the speaker says. You're holding the answer in your hands." - Kerri Webster