Presence Detection System is a collection of presence detection systems written between 19015 and 19017 by my mother’s daughter. Its composition was marked by the many things we came to violently disagree about, and it was thought, back then, that an abandonment of comparison could be the only way out. For example, we disagreed and disagree about whether to call what we call ourselves ‘misprisions.’ We disagreed and disagree about where to drape our lone antimacassar, how to clean it, who made it, etc. We disagreed and disagree about what is and isn’t an instance of gambling, which itself is, my mother would joke, “a kind of wager labour.” We even disagreed and disagree about love, even though we experience it, talk about it, act upon it and theorize it in exactly the same way.

But we did and we do agree about you. In this way, Presence Detection System became a unanimous agreement about you.

"In Presence Detection System, people look just a little surprised, or they look surprised; they nearly laugh, or they laugh outright. They are subject to description, just as they are subject to each other. Nora Collen Fulton warns that the things we have said about rules are subject to change by the things we might say about Ja Rule; the things we have said about fiction are subject to the things we might say about business. Disciplines cannot always be distinguished. This isn’t good news. There’s a risk someone might insist things are interchangeable that aren’t, and the translation is yours. You have some responsibility. A mom—a monocameral walled wall—knows this."
–Diana Sue Hamilton

Nora Collen Fulton is a poet living in Montreal. Her first book, Life Experience Coolant, was published by Bookthug. Presence Detection System is her second collection of poems, and her third, Thee Display, is forthcoming next year through the Documents Series, co-produced by the Center for Expanded Poetics and Anteism Books. She currently occupies herself with doctoral studies; her research attempts to apply debates in philosophy regarding the relationship between ontology and mathematics to the ontological stakes of trans studies.

Dialogues on Poetics - Nora Fulton

5.5 × 8 in.
116pp

978-1-7337098-1-1

$16 + $4 shipping