Description
Shortlisted for the Costa 2019 Poetry Award. . Winner of the 2020 Hawthornden Prize. Surreal, joyful, political and queer, Reckless Paper Birds is a collection to treasure by Polari Prize-winning poet John McCullough. These exuberant poems welcome you into a psychedelic, parallel world of 'vomit and blossom' where Kate Bush mingles with a weeping Lady Gaga, a 'fractal coast' full of see-through things: water, mirrors, glass pebbles. With a magpie's eye for hidden charms, McCullough ranges across birdlife, Grindr and My Little Pony while also addressing social issues from homelessness to homophobia.
About the Author
John McCullough's first collection of poems, The Frost Fairs, won the Polari First Book Prize and was a Book of the Year for The Independent as well as a summer read in The Observer. His most recent collection, Spacecraft (Penned in the Margins, 2016), was named one of The Guardian's Best Books for Summer and shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize. He teaches creative writing at the Open University and the University of Brighton.
Reviews
John McCullough has a reputation for crafting lyric poems of the everyday with a surreal twist. In Reckless Paper Birds, the familiar yet strange is rarely more than a stanza away. As if Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems jumped headlong into our 21st century, McCullough's lines sing of Lady Gaga, Instagram and house music.; Ben Wilkinson, The Guardian; A celebration of abundace ... a secular litany of life in its fullness and fragility.; Rob Mackenzie, Poetry London; The vitality of the poems, their nimbleness, their wit and their music combine to mark Reckless Paper Birds as a rare literary phenomenon. The book, for all its undercurrents and complexities, is a frank and militant declaration of joy - gay in a double sense of the word - and should be taken very seriously.; Christopher Reid, Judge of the 2020 Hawthornden Prize
Awards
Winner of Hawthornden Prize 2020. Short-listed for Costa 2019 Poetry Award 2019.
Book Information
ISBN 9781908058638
Author John McCullough
Format Paperback
Imprint Penned in the Margins
Publisher Penned in the Margins
Shortlisted for the Costa 2019 Poetry Award and winner of the 2020 Hawthornden Prize
About the Author
John McCullough's first collection of poems, The Frost Fairs, won the Polari First Book Prize and was a Book of the Year for The Independent as well as a summer read in The Observer. His most recent collection, Spacecraft (Penned in the Margins, 2016), was named one of The Guardian's Best Books for Summer and shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize. He teaches creative writing at the Open University and the University of Brighton.
Reviews
John McCullough has a reputation for crafting lyric poems of the everyday with a surreal twist. In Reckless Paper Birds, the familiar yet strange is rarely more than a stanza away. As if Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems jumped headlong into our 21st century, McCullough's lines sing of Lady Gaga, Instagram and house music.; Ben Wilkinson, The Guardian; A celebration of abundace ... a secular litany of life in its fullness and fragility.; Rob Mackenzie, Poetry London; The vitality of the poems, their nimbleness, their wit and their music combine to mark Reckless Paper Birds as a rare literary phenomenon. The book, for all its undercurrents and complexities, is a frank and militant declaration of joy - gay in a double sense of the word - and should be taken very seriously.; Christopher Reid, Judge of the 2020 Hawthornden Prize
Awards
Winner of Hawthornden Prize 2020. Short-listed for Costa 2019 Poetry Award 2019.
Book Information
ISBN 9781908058638
Author John McCullough
Format Paperback
Imprint Penned in the Margins
Publisher Penned in the Margins
