« the ground opens — the music
reveals the order of renewal

(Anne-Marie Albiach)


Cuckoo's Low Reel is a collection of poems in two registers.

The first register is a minimalist, serial poetry composed using a disassembled journal of weather, movement and correspondence kept between December 2021 and April 2023. The principle object of meditation in these pieces is the reel, a rhythmic form for fiddling commonly found in both Nova Scotian and Quebecois traditional music: conventionally one finds in a reel a pair of simple patterns which are played together in turns for the sake of dancing, for as long as the endurance of the fiddler and those who dance can hold.

The second register is that of the occasional poem, and specifically the ode and the anti-ode. These pieces take as their objects friends and family, lakes and hydroelectric dams, recipes and auctions, seasons and holidays, as well as birdsong - each object is given in two poems:, one of praise, and one of declamation.

There is also an additional, unnumbered register.

For the last twelve years, Nora Fulton has lived in Parc Extension, Montréal, Québec, Canada. Cuckoo's Low Reel is her fourth collection of poems, and her second from Hiding Press, after 2019's "Presence Detection System." Her other collections are Thee Display (2020) and Life Experience Coolant (2013). Her poetry has been published in the Paris Review, the Chicago Review, Trilobite, Some Magazine, Social Text, and elsewhere. Her critical writing has appeared in the Poetry Project Newsletter, O Bod, Music and Literature, and elsewhere. She is also a scholar whose research crosses the fields of trans theory, continental philosophy, and literary studies. Her scholarly work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Textual Practice, the Journal of Lesbian Studies, the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Diacritics, Radical Philosophy, and elsewhere.

Nora Fulton - “Presence Detection System”

96pp
5.5 × 8 in.
Forthcoming 2025