Description
Book Synopsis*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST SINGLE POEM* From the mercurial mind of award-winning poet John McCullough comes his darkest and most experimental book to date. Panic Response puts personal and cultural anxiety under the microscope. It is full of things that shimmer, quiver and fizz: plankton glowing at low tide; brain tissue turning to glass; a basketball emerging from the waves, covered in barnacles. These are poems of uncertainty but also of hope, which move beyond the breathlessness of panic towards luminescence and solidarity.
Trade Review'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
