Launch reading by Lily Blacksell, Rita Ann Higgins and John McCullough
Join Bloodaxe for this launch event for new March titles by Lily Blacksell, Rita Ann Higgins and John McCullough. All three poets will be celebrating the publication of their new books by reading live and discussing their work with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley.
This free Bloodaxe launch event will be streamed on YouTube Live on this YouTube page: https://youtube.com/live/p_0hOeoZUtE
Please note that you will not be joining on Zoom, so you should not worry about logging in on Zoom. No log-in is needed. You just need to go to the YouTube page at 7pm GMT.
If you register to attend on TicketTailor you will receive an event link reminder by email by midday the day before the event. For those who can't make it live, the reading will be available on YouTube afterwards via the same YouTube link: https://youtube.com/live/p_0hOeoZUtE
If you miss the registration deadline, you can still watch live via the Bloodaxe YouTube channel.
To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links. (Books will be available to order from early March.)
John McCullough: Crowd Voltage
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/crowd-voltage-1392
Rita Ann Higgins: Jiving with Wasps: New & Selected Poems
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/jiving-with-wasps-1393
Lily Blacksell: Life Immediately
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/life-immediately-1391
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John McCullough: Crowd Voltage
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.
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Rita Ann Higgins: Jiving with Wasps: New & Selected Poems
Poetry Book Society Special Commendation
Jiving with Wasps is a new retrospective from Ireland's Rita Ann Higgins drawing on a dozen books of poetry published over four decades, from Goddess on the Mervue Bus (1986) to The Long Weekend (2024), in addition to new poems appearing here for the first time. These are provocative and heart-warming poems of high jinks and telling social comment by a gutsy, anarchic chronicler of Irish lives and foibles. Defiantly mischievous, playfully subversive, this irreverent iconoclast has been achieving even wider popularity through her regular appearances on RTÉ's Brendan O'Connor Show: 'Rita Ann Higgins is the people's poet. She's magic. She's a one-off.'
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Lily Blacksell: Life Immediately
Life Immediately is a pacy, dynamic debut collection containing all the preoccupations of Lily Blacksell’s work, from womanhood, to music, to the natural world and our calamitous dealings with it, to the calamity and comedy of human relationships, romantic or otherwise. In eclectic, formally confident poems, balancing keen observation with wry insouciance, Blacksell’s writing showcases the expansiveness of language, but also its failures. Communication builds up and breaks down, geese honk, hangovers linger. Figures from Madonna to Magwitch appear, but not necessarily as you know them. Familiar settings – the pub, the library, the farmyard, the house party – are made strange. These are ranging poems with a rangy humour, and warmth as well as wit.
[17 December 2025]
