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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; 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. His first collection of poems The Frost Fairs (Salt, 2011) won the Polari First Book Prize.
'Elegant, curious, and surreal, McCullough’s poetry invades like moss, making everything alive again. A stunning, vibrant collection from one of the UK’s most inventive thinkers. Glorious.' – Joelle Taylor on Crowd Voltage
'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, on Panic Response
'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, on Panic Response