Forrest-Thomson's Poetic Artifice is explored, both as a theory of poetry, which emphasizes form, artifice, and processes of good and bad naturalization, and as a poetics for her own poetry. While her terms are treated as useful tools in attempting to show how artifice can critique the world, her concepts of the "image-complex" and 'suspended naturalization", and her insistence that artifice is "non-meaningful", are found wanting. The semiotics of Yuri Lotman and the thinking of Charles Bernstein rescue these terms, but not enough to stop Forrest-Thomson's forensic analysis of her own poetry demonstrating the impossibility of fusing theory with poetics, even though she throughout maintains the primacy of artifice.