In her 1997 debut, Perhaps This Is a Rescue Fantasy, Washington, D.C.–area poet Fuller tore disjunctively through the city's radia and designed a series of didactic placards that demanded to be enlarged and held aloft. The poems of Fuller's second collection play on both senses of her title: "dovecote" can mean a pigeon house or (according to Merriam Webster's) "a settled or harmonious group or organization." The book's opening sequence is a response to artist Perreaoult Daniels, who wrote an open letter to Fuller after having volunteered with her at the Washington Project for the Arts; Fuller's "Apostal Decision (Time Sensitive)" asks, "did we have idle hands// not institutions we are living tho' there/ we're dead what we do to walls will be/ our ruins." The poems of the sequence "Quarter" take their titles from various varieties of barbed wire—"Crandal's Champion," "C.A. Hodge Pur Rowel" ("Hodge Spur along the Egypt Road/ the work-release are passing/ don't laugh sneeze or say/ money in sight of church") and "Brinkerhoff-Martelle Ribbon" ("a pony of wine to wash off the blood")—and include ominously innocuous sketches of each. Throughout the collection, people collide with institutions, be they palliative, benign or correctional, and the results are most often not pretty. Yet Fuller tempers Rescue Fantasy's flat-out disgust somewhat, treating the "bitumin pupil conspiracy/ mummy epoxy" of contemporary American life with humor and some tenderness, admonishing, "please don't turn off the porchlights to the trick-or-treat because you don't believe." While reader and speaker alike may maintain their skepticism, this dovecote provides an ultimately empowering place to roost. (May)
