Author in Profile: Colin Fulton

“If the statement ‘I am a poet’ is structurally identical to the statement ‘I am a macaron,’ then it’s either an unverifiable statement or macarons are sentient. And I’m totally ok with the latter. So extrapolating from that, the best thing about being a macaron is the complete lack of demands made of you, and the worst thing about being a macaron is that people stick you in their mouths and eat you without remorse.”

—Colin Fulton

Colin Fulton is one of BookThug’s three debut authors this season, and we are very excited to have published his first collection of poetry, Life Experience Coolant. The collection is four long poems informed by artistic isolation, directionless reading, and the avoidance of mechanisms that make poetry simultaneously possible and impossible at our current cultural velocity. It explores transgenderedness, the late-late-late capitalist situation, gaming culture and new media, contemporary Canadian politics, and satirizations of conceptual poetics and antimemoir.

As well as love.

“Satiatory relaxcellence…Delicious as tears…
Tofurkyish in the best possible way.”
Donato Mancini

Of course, such an intensely and diversely investigative book can only be expected from a poet who, in a recent profile on Open Book Toronto, listed some of his sources of inspiration as

• the comments sections of YouTube videos that have their comment section disabled,
• forgotten theoretical economic systems such as distributism and participism,
• instruction manuals for becoming psychic and telepathic, but only those written by admitted frauds,
• corporate leadership and communication manuals,
• old travel magazines that talk about great vacation opportunities in places now destroyed by war or ecological collapse,
• seasonal labour, and
• computer games.

(None of which, he says, strike him as particularly unusual sources for poetry.)

“There is a generosity in this writing, a refusal to mask any of the intimacy
of the numerous exchanges it reports. This isn’t chic LA performance art,
this isn’t what you’d call a ‘safe place,’ this is a poem”
Tim Lilburn 

Colin’s nomadic tendencies meant that, when I asked where he was from, the answer was not so simple as [here]—it was a roundabout reply, encompassing Calgary, Nova Scotia, Victoria, and Montreal. He was born in Calgary in 1897, but grew up in Nova Scotia, but then spent many years in Victoria studying Poetry, Political Ecology, and Philosophy at UVic. Most recently, Colin is in Montreal, pursuing a Master’s in English at Concordia. For more information about Colin, you can look at Michael Nardone’s pontifications, and a video interview will be posted to the BookThug website soon! You can also read his poetry on Lemon Hound.

Praise for Life Experience Coolant

“We pass through a consciousness entertaining the non-effects of large doses of Lurasidone, the realism of a Hermann Broch character (Huguenau), Islamic apophaticism, all in the first pages of the first poem. A raw realism where everything could happen at once is on display here or, better yet, a phenomenology in its purest state, sped by a happy confidence in the energies and various intentionalities in the state of ordinary wakefulness.”

–Tim Lilburn

“Satiatory relaxcellence, from the leisurely experiential wealth of the margins. Beheaded then reheaded, a slangy tractatus. Delicious as tears. An improvement of serious culture. Totally ok with stuff. Tofurkyish in the best possible way, revels in revelatory giddiness between recreational arson and hot-yogic heat-signatures. (These anarchoprimitivists sure are some fun peepz.) Gasoline is flammable as Life Experience Coolant. GET TO THIS, partake.”

–Donato Mancini