
‘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.’
A 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”. Ian Thomson said “True stars in poetry like Cullen are not afraid to learn from the brazen avant-garderies of Ezra Pound and company. Brocaded with reflections on homeland and exile, Paranoid Narcissism! is a magnificent, thrillingly metropolitan outpouring of the personal set against a backdrop of the city.”
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.
About Hologram (2022), poet August Kleinzahler said, “‘Guest List’, the first section of Miguel Cullen’s original new collection is unlike any poetry I’ve ever encountered. It ranges across various cultures, especially popular culture and dwells somewhere between the expressionistic and surreal, subversive, and possessed of unparalleled energy. His subjects include Tiberius, Brad Pitt, Proust, Frank Ocean, and, most especially, Maradona, a sort of extended personal essay.”
