Reckless Paper Birds

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.

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