Crowd Voltage

by John McCullough

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.

Genres: Poetry

62 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 26, 2026

About the author

John McCullough’s words are full of a freshness and invention which have seen him described as Brighton’s brightest young poet. Often beginning from anecdotal, transitory incidents, his pieces filter reality through a sophisticated array of voices, variously formal, abstract, surreal and humorous, merging and subtly blending as his artfully chosen subjects dictate.

Based in Brighton, McCullough teaches creative writing at the Open University and the University of Sussex, where he was awarded his doctorate for a thesis on friendship in English Renaissance writing. He has published in The Rialto, The Guardian, Ambit, London Magazine, Magma, The Wolf and Chroma, in whose international writing competition he won second prize in 2008. John was also co-editor of the Queer Writing South anthology Whoosh!, published by Pighog.