Panic Response

Panic Response Synopsis

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE

2021

FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST SINGLE

POEM*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