Fuller, Katie E.: Careful

Anhinga, paperback

Publication Date: October 1, 2023

Publisher Marketing: 

"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.'