words." "Nothing is lonlier than what's human." "...as free verse broke the pentameter, fractal verse can break the poem plane or linguistic surface." Many critics have commented on Fulton's command of scientific metaphor. Marti-Subirana asserted that "Alice Fulton's poetry stands as one of the most representative examples of intellectual exchange between contemporary experimental poetics and modern science — as represented by quantum physics, chaos theory and complexity theory." Marti-Subirana has elaborated on Fulton's use of "Complexity theory and Darwinism‚" and has identified a dimension of Fulton's work that she calls "Fulton's poetry of emergence." "This dimension examines individual and collective emotions (such as detachment and compassion), and behavioral patterns (such as cruelty) from the perspective of emergence and emergent patterns." "Emergence‚" is a central tenet of John H. Holland's description of Complex Adaptive Systems. Harvard mathematician Barry Mazur has written about Fulton's poetics and its relation to the "science of connections bridging differences." Mazur claims that Fulton engages with mathematics as the "science of the subtle glues ... that bind different ideas together, and yet keep them distinguished." He noted that "The very connectors themselves come out into the open in the poem entitled '= =.' " Sensual Math contains a number of poems that deploy and define her "bride sign." As with all of Fulton's books, including her fiction and nonfiction prose, Sensual Math is a carefully constructed web of interrelated parts that form an organic whole. One critic predicted that "Sensual Math might well come to be seen as one of the most significant volumes of the 1990s." Writing about the double-equal sign, Lynn Keller commented, Her inventive work, which stretches the linguistic, tonal, vocal, and emotional range of contemporary lyric, points ultimately to resources that lie between recognized categories, in liminal states, and at the cultural margins as offering hope for significant social and aesthetic change. Her double equal sign and other rejections of patriarchal binaries aim ... to counter the destructive othering that pervades all aspects of our lives ... Physicist Karen Barad's book, Meeting the Universe Halfway, takes its title from Alice Fulton's poem "Cascade Experiment," first published in 1989. Gabriel Mckee, comments that the poem "contains this compelling passage: "The poem is a wonderful combination of science and faith, and finds mystery in empiricism." Mckee continues, saying that the poem reminds him "of the 14th-century mystical text The Cloud of Unknowing, the title of