Panic Response

by John McCullough

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.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published March 15, 2022

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.

Reviews

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

sizzly saucy & a different tonality of queerness to what we're accustomed to by now I'm still working that out. fond of john. I like Pour a lot.\

Tonight I do not need to be understood

[maggie · Rating 3 out of 5]

amorphous. persistent. threading the line between the hyperrealistic and the liminal. i wasn't fully immersed from start to finish, mostly because there were highly specific experiences that did not hold the same significance to me and yes yes, i know that the relatability of a poem is not indicative of its value and impact, however, for a poetry collection which is hearty and intimate, it does create distance. however, i can appreciate the weight of the mementos and the author's feelings towards them. i loved his musings on the constant battle of grappling with your thoughts, trying to pin them down into something tangible enough to write on paper, something that doesn't immediately ring wrong; having to find an equilibrium between a singular I and the plurality of self, coming to terms with the fact that humans are not contradictory but complex; the love that stays in the grief that pervades; the cyclically of anxiety and the body that, if wound, will always inevitably unwind; water and poetry and meaning and what it does to a mf.

i really enjoyed the experimental style at time, with 'mantle' being one of my favourite poems of the collection. i loved the disjointed storytelling and the ability for the reader to piece different storylines and perspective by reading it differently. i love the idea of 'leaving' as a continuous process and not a fixed point in time, the inability to truly 'leave' or 'to have left'; you are always leaving and leaving until that's the only way in which you exist. however, sometimes it veered into the territory of overly experimental that, personally, did not appeal to me. this leads me to another issue i had, which is the choice of certain comparisons and analogies. in some cases, the similes used used were so incongruent with the flow of the thought that i had to do a double take and it kind of ruined the experience for me. one example i will never forget is Death being compared "a bit" to justin bieber ("scrambled eggs"). completely out of left field. like i guess i Get It but also it did not make me want to put down the book for a moment any less.

favourite excerpts:

the whole of "Mantle"

"J" — "And so it starts, though I cannot. // Despite my being unable to say the first words // there is a voice doing it, this not-speaking." [...] "Likewise, there are phrases that I (whoever this is) // am reluctant to approach, to slide from their lead-lined box // in case my skin candles to green, words I cannot form // without a chance of my teeth falling out." [...] "I had dissected every text, by which I mean I incised // their skins then weighed their organs in my palms, // warm kidneys, spleens and lungs, // till each went cold and I realised I'd been removing pieces of myself, a little at a time."

"Coombeland Mannequin" — "It makes me almost happy, a vague thickness like spun sugar: a good minute, unfathomable. Is that all happiness is? An absence, no lingering crow in the rear-view mirror?" [...] "I don't want to be a mannequin so I look at power lines overhead — lines for the living. I dream of setting out over coombeland in the mist, the tops of pylons poking through, and voicing a spell that saves them somehow — everyone in my life beyond rescue — as if anything so fractured as language might help, as if one human figure could hold back winter." (love the hints of divine machinery)

"Old Ocean's Bauble" — "To gaze at it was to reach and caress it // underneath, fingers wakening the rich clatter // of shells. It was like stroking knowledge, // the accumulations of a head that had sailed // inside itself for years." [...] "They understood that others could need // this prophecy, might stare into its eyeless, // mouth less face, construe the terrible warning."

"Bungaroosh" — "Last summer, my light got lost inside me. Total internal reflection, said the physicist on TV once she'd trapped a laser beam in the waterfall. Round and round it goes ..."

"Six!" — "I spent too long inside not just my bed but my mind which, if it's a habit that affords gladness now and then, prevents deep delight. Ecstasy comes from the Greek ekstasis, to stand outside the self. To encounter it, I had to leave my thoughts and commune with the endless, not just the vast space above my head but what collapses distinctions of time." [...] "Only so much can unfold on the lip of a volcano or mid-air. The limited access we have to boundless pleasure is a condition of its existence. //
Another condition for delight is disbelief. To be carried away, you must forget at some level any such experience is possible."

[Eve McIntosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best poetry collections I’ve read in a long time. I adore this style, and reading through these poems has made me genuinely excited and inspired. I’m unsure of how to define John’s style of poetry but something about it has me fizzling. Thanks for broadening my creative horizons!

[Memoona Ahmed · Rating 5 out of 5]

I inhaled this book. John is exceptional, and the emotions in Panic Response had me on a perpetual ocean wave. The sheer power of imagery and colour underpinning it all. A poetry book should always leave you a bit stunned and this one left me plenty.

[Serge ♆ Neptune · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most brilliant queer poets in the country. Different from other queer writers for his surrealism, weirdness, creative turns of phrases, this is John's best book to date.

[cait · Rating 4 out of 5]

the last poem in this broke me into tears