Panic Response

John McCullough's first collection of poems, The Frost Fairs, won the Polari First Book Prize and was a Book of the Year for The Independent. His second, Spacecraft (Penned in the Margins, 2016), was named one of The Guardian's Best Books for Summer and shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize. His latest collection, Reckless Paper Birds (Penned in the Margins, 2019) was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award.

'John McCullough's fully alive new book experiments with every unit of expression - word, phrase, sentence, line break - as if trying to work out the physics of poetry after the death of John Ashbery. The experience of language here is an intense hallucination, in which the anxious world of the 2020s is both distinctly real and almost weightless, and love and friendship as hard to hold as the 'salt, dust and recycled breath' that blows through the poet's Brighton. But 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; 'I read these poems like a child reads anything for the first time, 'oohing' and 'ahhing' and laughing and being surprised and saddened and enriched and getting zapped with each poem's unique electrical charge. Queerness, years of COVID-19, tropes of panic, are all themes which arise again and again across this collection, but most satisfying is the point of view of the poet; 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. A book for our troubled times.'; MONIQUE ROFFEY