John McCullough's Crowd Voltage addresses yearnings for community. It probes fragmentation within groups and individuals – disturbances within the body of the crowd and the crowd of the body. Engaging with working-class and queer experiences, the poems move between solitude and togetherness, haunted by ghosts from history as they dream of unity and discover joy in deserted corners. To be common here is to share not only qualities but stories with many others – to be classed alongside people with similar origins and become connected also to what is commonplace in the world of animals and plants, days and tables. Sky and sea dominate as the speakers search for oneness and completion, confronted by vast silences and the shadow of Brighton’s collapsing West Pier.
John McCullough has published four previous collections, one with Salt and three with Penned in the Margins, most recently, the Costa-shortlisted Reckless Paper Birds (2019), winner of the Hawthornden Prize, and Panic Response (2022), which included his long poem 'Flowers of Sulphur', shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.
Praise for Panic Response:
'McCullough is a visionary, a genius polymath. His worlds and miniature observations are deeply satisfying to stumble into. McCullough’s writing feels tender, intimate, zany and yes …cool.' – Monique Roffey
'John McCullough’s fully alive new book experiments with every unit of expression… Line after line here shines out with its own shape and meaning, and through the unreality runs real feeling, sincere desire for the shared emotion of poetry: "to be lost in a new and beautiful manner".' – Jeremy Noel-Tod
Praise for Reckless Paper Birds:
'A rare literary phenomenon…a frank and militant declaration of joy.' – Christopher Reid, Head Judge for the 2020 Hawthornden Prize for Literature, Times Literary Supplement
'This collection – hilarious, harrowing and hyper-modern – offers a startlingly fresh insight into vulnerability and suffering.' – 2019 Costa Poetry Award judges
'John McCullough is a poet you need to know.' – Sarah Howe
'McCullough’s poetic terrain is one of subtly-rendered and political surrealism… Reckless Paper Birds is a timely and necessary collection which vibrates with protest; these poems are talismans against hate.' – Richard Scott
'Dazzling, synaesthetic… In these visceral, political poems, history "presses its mouth" to our bodies and whispers strange secrets – McCullough has listened and found a language for them.' – Helen Mort
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