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