Alice Fulton's poetry explores the human mind, faith, science, and technology. "Her poems are at once deeply personal and defiantly abstract," asserted Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky in Dictionary of Literary Biography. The essayist found that Fulton's work gives insight into "the workings of the poetic imagination, the way poetry emerges from the mind's web of associations, stimulated by memory, experience, and the seductions of popular culture." Lobanov-Rostovsky characterized Fulton's work as challenging but rewarding: "Her poems demand from her readers nothing less than immersion, a process in which they share the creation of meaning by allowing the poem to shape—but not dictate—their own consciousness. Her meanings are multiple, fluid, and provisional; reading her work reveals our minds to be the same."

Commenting on Fulton's vivid imagery in poetry collections such as Palladium and Sensual Math, Julie Miller wrote in Contemporary Women Poets that it "has the neon appeal of an arcade. It is filled with Jacuzzis and Tilt-a-whirls, escalators and guitars. It is peopled with strippers, studs, steel plant owners, and nuns." Miller counted "faith" as one of the major concerns of Fulton's poetry, and noted that when the poet turned to science and technology, that faith increased rather than diminished.

Fulton offered readers a collection of prose essays with Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry. Using scientific theories to comment on poetry, Fulton suggests a "less stable world view" with "a less predictable aesthetics, and aesthetics of playfulness and irregularity," commented Scott Hightower in Library Journal. "These essays . . . address the deepest inner insistencies of style and our humanity. The result is a provocative ride." A Publishers Weekly reviewer also commented favorably on the "wit and verve" in Feeling as a Foreign Language, further noting that Fulton "wants her readers to share her beliefs—in the worth of disjunction, in the value of physics for poets, and in the need to work for women's equality. In several of these essays, they'll find the exemplary verve to do so."