John McCullough 🏳️🌈
@JohnMcCullough_
Poet. Winner of the Hawthornden Prize for Literature with Reckless Paper Birds. Forward and Costa-shortlisted. Next book: Crowd Voltage (Bloodaxe, March 2026).
Excited to say my fifth collection of poems, Crowd Voltage, will be published by @BloodaxeBooks in March 2026. It's a high energy book about class, crowds and community. This specially designed cover is by the brilliant queer artist, Villain.
If we did not hold so much, I would not write. —Linda Gregg
Anna Akhmatova, translated from the Russian by D.M. Thomas in Akhmatova Poems (Everyman, 2006).
Been working on my next collection Crowd Voltage since 2021, aiming to find fresh ways to write about working-class and queer experiences that would draw on my typically energetic approach to imagery and phrase-making. Here are some of the writers I’ve gone back to most often…
Joanna Klink. From the sequence ‘Night Sky’ in her beautiful collection The Nightfields (Penguin, 2020).
W. S. Merwin, 1977. From: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2007).
Jackie Wills. From: Woman’s Head as Jug (Arc, 2013).
Helen Oswald. From: Learning Gravity (tall-lighthouse, 2010).
Alejandra Pizarnik, translated by Yvette Siegert. From Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972 (New Directions, 2016).
Tracy K. Smith, 2011. Text here from Such Color: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf, 2021).
Anne Carson. From: ‘Short Talks’ in Plainwater (Vintage, 1995).
Jane Hirshfield. This is from The Asking: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2024).
Patrizia Cavalli, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff in My Poems Won’t Change the World (Penguin, 2018).
Joy Harjo. From How We Became Human, New and Selected Poems: 1975-2001 (Norton, 2004).
Kim Addonizio. This is the opening of a poem in her fantastic recent collection, Exit Opera (Norton, 2024). I’ve been a fan for a long time and for me this book and the last see her at the top of her game. So wildly imaginative and thoughtful, intimate and funny all at once.
