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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
'Crowd Voltage is a lively, striking exploration of community and connectedness, McCullough paints the body as part of something bigger, whether celestial, architectural, or ecological – these poems examine class, queer lineage, and our "non-human family". [...] A bright and thoughtful book.' – Jenny Danes, Poetry Book Society Bulletin
‘The pursuit of a community or crowd is perhaps the central queer origin myth. When you've found said crowd you could become the cool kids, the in crowd - you belong and are finally afforded some plurality. The singular pronoun becomes collective. These concerns are explored in John McCullough's perky and open-hearted Crowd Voltage […] There is a preternatural empathy laced through McCullough's work, […] Poems in this collection put me in mind of a meeting of Mark Doty and Frank O'Hara, but something uniquely McCullough's too in their openness. […] The collection swings delightfully from the surreal - the voice of Brighton's iconic and collapsing West Pier features heavily – to the more straightforward albeit beautiful lyric poems and then back again’ – Mícheál McCann, The Irish Times
'...a collection alive with the tension between solitude and togetherness. The poems explore what it means to belong, to a crowd, to a body, to a shared story. Moving through working-class and queer experience, these poems explore both connection and fracture, the ways we come apart and the ways we find each other again.' – Poetry Pharmacy, on Crowd Voltage (Book of the Month for March 2026)
'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