Miguel Cullen



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Hologram : featured by The Poetry Book Society, Spring 2022

Hologram : review, The Morning Star, July 28 2022

Hologram : review, Ambit Magazine 246, Spring 2022

PURPLE TV presents: '"Maradona & the Pope" a visual poem by Miguel Cullen and Ivar Wigan

Paranoid Narcissism! : A vibrant collection, thrumming with the energy of life in the metropolis. Erotic Review, 14th December 2017

Paranoid Narcissism! - Book of the Year. Evening Standard, 23rd November 2017


Wave Caps : Making Waves. Erotic Review, 8th October 2014

Wave Caps : London’s Junglist Bard proves poetry’s for the people - Vice, 22nd August 2014

Wave Caps : Miguel Cullen’s first collection. The Literateur, 15th August 2014

Wave Caps : Former hack turns poet. The East End Review, 13th August 2014 

Wave Caps : ‘Book of the Year’. TLS, 2014




“Cullen’s ability to be ironic and playful at the same time, combined with an eclectic language of the surreal and the hypermodern ... This is a three-dimensional book that makes you see the world in a new, exciting light ... Hologram is adventurous, whimsical unusual poetic alchemy” Leo Boix (in The Morning Star)

“Cullen’s exciting and completely original new collection is unlike any other poetry I’ve ever encountered. It ranges across various cultures, especially popular culture and dwells somewhere between the expressionistic and the surreal, subversive, and posessed of unparalleled energy. His subjects include Tiberius, Frank Ocean, Proust, Brad Pitt, and most especially, Maradona a sort of extended personal essay.
If there’s a musical analogue for his poetry it’s the swoosh and sizzle of wire brushes swept across the drum head, of Chinese symbol, electric, reverberant, of the moment and wild. What more can one hope for as a beacon in the cultural scrum we find ourselves.” August Kleinzahler

“Lyrical, voluminously expressive, beautiful in their knotted, winding intensity - Miguel Cullen’s poems have the register of a memory one wants not to remember, intricate, detailed, funny for everyone but you, unpleasantly bright and brilliant.” - S J Fowler

“Paranoid Narcissism! brims with vitality and wit. Miguel Cullen has an extraordinary ear for the complex rhythms and lovely, snarling cadences of urban speech.” - Edmund Gordon


“High quality work” - Nine Arches Press

“Rich language and verve” - The Emma Press


“All life is in these witty, sweet-sour poems... Cullen’s work has a mad coherence of its own. Paranoid Narcissism! is a magnificent, thrillingly metropolitan outpouring of the personal set against a backdrop of the city.” - Ian Thomson

“Brilliant stuff” - Tom Chivers, Penned in the Margins

“This is modern poetry, imbued with the sound and rhythm of the classics but, at the same time, aware and reacting to the nuances of modern life - its ironies, pleasures, and toils. Written in compact yet lyrical lines, Cullen sometimes brings to mind Robert Lowell’s History poems. A beautifully produced collection, garlanded with striking artwork.” - The Catholic Herald, August 2017

“Each of the subtly-crafted poems contains a surprise; each is a distinct work of art, with the power to move, shake, change us.” - A N Wilson
“Miguel Cullen’s poems devise their own sound-world, polyglot, eclectic, tightrope-walking with nonchalant accomplishment across the liminal cityscapes of a haunted, visionary cosmopolis.” - Jonathan Keates


“Wave Caps... crackles with reflections on music, love, migration, exile, and friendship... pavement pounding street demotic with the mandarin modernity of Ezra Pound. These poems are by turns funny, street-smart, elegiac, and quirkily conversational.” - Ian Thomson
“A beautifully weighted, muscular urban rhythm.” -
Jonathan Catherall at The Literateur