‘I used to look in the mirror by holding up a twenty pound note; I would look all hot air; a ghost; a fleeting vision; a light that had gone out.’
Miguel Cullen is a British/Argentine poet and journalist.
When mi was a youth I used to run up and down playing cowboy: a story of cannabis-induced psychosis
What seemed like a soft-play of weed lucidity would seem to ebb away – lifeline-imprinted snow becoming water.
The writers that have influenced me
I reached the neurotic finale of The Brothers Karamazov on a neon-lit park bench at night in Guayaquil in Ecuador.
My favourite book
Justice was really an ashtray to display / the lynched carcass of a stubbed-out cigar.
Miguel Cullen in conversation with Gabriel Gbadamosi
Some arrive early, suffer less, some arrive late, suffer more, but are compensated by having more to say.
Biography
A British-Argentine poet and journalist, Miguel Cullen is culturally a Kelper (Falklander) evacuee, nourished in London by cocoa butter liniment. His first collection, Wave Caps (2014), was a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year. VICE described it as “full of the lawless energy of late nights and early mornings, hop-scotching London’s jungle raves”.
His second collection Paranoid Narcissism! (2017) was an Evening Standard Book of the Year, and A N Wilson said of it “Each of these subtly crafted poems contains a surprise; each is a distinct work of art, with the power to shake, move, change us”.
Cullen has been published in: Caught by the River, the East End Review/Hackney Citizen, the Erotic Review, The Literateur, London magazine, Lunar Poetry, Magma Poetry, Mardulce, Stand and Vice. He was commended in the Segora Poetry Prize 2016 and was recently short-listed for the Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year Award 2020.
