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# Crowd Voltage by John McCullough
- URL: https://www.scenemag.co.uk/crowd-voltage-by-john-mccullough/
- Published: 2026-10-01T12:07:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-22T12:07:18.000Z
- Description: Poet John McCullough wires the queer hunger for belonging into the mains, splicing working-class roots, ghostly family, the West Pier into one crackling meditation. Tender, strange, cosmic, it finds kinship everywhere in moss, giraffes, tracksuits, tide. A gorgeous, generous shock.
- Author: Eric Page
- Tags: Culture, John McCullough, book review

There's a reason "finding your people" functions as something close to queer scripture. We've all lived the before-and-after of it: the long, singular years, and then the sudden plural — the moment a lone pronoun finds its crowd and gets to multiply. You become one of the cool kids, finally granted the dignity of *we*. John McCullough's fifth collection, out now from Bloodaxe, takes that founding myth and runs a current through it, title and all. *Crowd Voltage* is a book about what happens the instant "I" becomes "us" — and about everything that sparks, shorts out, or gets quietly electrocuted in the transition.

The collection arrives split into two facing halves, "The Body of the Crowd" and "The Crowd of the Body," and it spends its length circling one live wire: how the group both makes us and unmakes us, how belonging is never a clean fix but a current that can just as easily short-circuit as illuminate. McCullough writes working-class and queer experience not as parallel themes but as wiring twisted through the same fuse box, sparking off each other. His speakers swing between solitude and togetherness the way tide swings in and out — never quite settling, always half-listening for the next crowd's hum. Ghosts crowd in too: ancestral, literary, historical, occasionally turning up cheekily undead at the Christmas table, demanding cheesecake and attention in equal measure. And presiding over the whole collection like a faded, magnificent drag queen of a landmark is Brighton's own collapsing West Pier — battered, structurally iffy, utterly compelling, occasionally handed the microphone to narrate in its own voice.

![](https://www.scenemag.co.uk/content/images/2026/09/685b0b775b123.jpg)

Author Photo Creidt John McCullough

What makes the book so moving, though, is how far McCullough stretches the idea of kinship. To belong here isn't only to share a story with other people — it's to be classed alongside tables and moss and hoverflies, alongside sky and sea and every other quietly persistent thing that has ever tried to hold its shape against the weather. It's a lush, slightly cosmic notion of chosen family, one that keeps expanding outward until the whole non-human world is quietly, tenderly, let in on the joke.

Up close, the poems are gorgeous, strange little machines. In "I Was Born in an Adidas Tracksuit," a body dressed respectably still can't quite hide its stripes — McCullough confesses, with real ache under the humour, that he can feel himself "wearing it now," decades on, synthetic skin and all. In "Giraffe," a boy scolded for having "ideas above his station" simply becomes one — gangly, herbivorous, magnificent — finding his own kind at last among "a forest of extravagant breathing." These aren't gimmicks. They're small, exact miracles of tone, funny and devastating within the same breath.

That tenderness threaded under the surrealism is McCullough's real trick, and the reason the book lingers. He's a poet equally fluent in intimacy and mischief, with an eye for the strange and the miniature that makes the ordinary world genuinely crackle. Reading *Crowd Voltage* feels like being let into every kind of crowd he's ever known — the ones that saved him, the ones that crushed him, and the improvised, glorious ones built out of ghosts and giraffes when the real thing hadn't yet arrived. Plug in. Mind the sparks.

Out now from Bloodaxe books £12.99\. For more info or[ to order here: ](https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/crowd-voltage-1392?ref=scenemag.co.uk)

![](https://www.scenemag.co.uk/content/images/2026/09/685b0bc8ce58d-1.jpg)