*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.

Shortlisted for the Costa 2019 Poetry Award. . Winner of the 2020 Hawthornden Prize. Surreal, joyful, political and queer, Reckless Paper Birds is a collection to treasure by Polari Prize-winning poet John McCullough. These exuberant poems welcome you into a psychedelic, parallel world of 'vomit and blossom' where Kate Bush mingles with a weeping Lady Gaga, a 'fractal coast' full of see-through things: water, mirrors, glass pebbles. With a magpie's eye for hidden charms, McCullough ranges across birdlife, Grindr and My Little Pony while also addressing social issues from homelessness to homophobia.

Locating Migrating Media details the extent to which media productions, both televisual and cinematic, have sought out new and cheaper shot locations, creative staff, and financing around the world. The book contributes to debates about media globalization, focusing on the local impact of new sites of media production. The book's chapters also question the role that film and television industries and local and regional governments play in broader economic develop and tax incentive schemes. While metaphors of transportation, mobility, fluidity and change continue to serve as key concepts and frames for understanding contemporary media industries, products and processes, the essays in this book look to local spaces, neighborhoods, cultural workers and stories to ground the global that is, to interrogate the effect of media globalization before, during and after film and television shooting and onsite production. By locating migrating media, these chapters seek to determine the political, economic and cultural conditions that produce contemporary forms of televisual and cinematic storytelling, and how these processes affect the inhabitants, the "look" and the very geopolitical future of local communities, neighborhoods, cities and regions. The focus on relocated screen production highlights the act of film- and television-making, both aesthetically and economically. To locate migrating media is therefore to determine the political and cultural economies of globalized sets and stages, be they in new studios or on city streets or, perhaps most importantly, in our imaginations."

Spacecraft navigates the white space of the page and the distance between people. Margins, edges and coastlines abound in John McCullough's tender, humorous explorations of contemporary life and love. Encompassing everything from lichen to lava lamps, and from the etymology of words to Brighton's gay scene, Spacecraft is a humane and spellbinding collection from the winner of the 2012 Polari first Book Prize.

Winner of the 2012 Polari Prize A Book of the Year for The Independent and The Poetry School Holiday Read in The Observer The Frost Fairs is a compassionate book with a global and historical scope, tackling science and city life from a range of surreal yet poignant angles. It explores love in many forms, from modern transatlantic relationships to hidden gay and cross-gendered lives from the past. The pieces travel from ancient Alexandria to twenty-first century bars and council estates, behind everything the vastness of the sea and sky. The array of voices here is striking: taxi drivers report their most outlandish fares and hermaphrodite statues flirt with observers; abandoned lovers watch frost fairs melting on the Thames and drag queens revel in the freedoms afforded by the Blitz. Formally deft and carefully crafted, this diverse range of poems uses language that is always musical and alive. Surprise and the uncanny are cherished as ways of returning to us the strange leaps and enduring power of our deepest yearnings. In this collection, longing and losing condition all we see and hear, making the impossible suddenly plausible. Whether exploring Brighton seascapes or questions of empire, there is always in McCullough's writing an openness to seeing the world from an alternative point of view. At once bold and haunting, The Frost Fairs opens the door to a new country in the reader's imagination in its exploration of the possibilities of the human heart.

For eight seasons between 2001 and 2010, Fox's 24 garnered critical accolades and became one of the most watched and discussed shows in primetime. In an innovative premise, the show's hour-long episodes were meant to represent a real-time hour of the story, so that each twenty-four-episode season depicts a single day in the life of its characters. Influential as a popular hit, 24 was also closely linked with the "culture of fear" that dominated the post-9/11 period. In this insightful study, author John McCullough demonstrates that the series was not only unique and trendsetting, but also a complex creative response to its historical context. In three chapters, McCullough looks at 24's form, style and overarching themes and meanings. He argues that although the series is driven by the political and cultural shifts brought on by the War on Terror, it is routinely out of step with real history. Using Linda Williams's distinction between the melodramatic mode and melodrama as a genre, McCullough explores 24's use of the action-adventure and spy thriller forms with particular attention paid to the series' hero, Jack Bauer, who is depicted as a tragic hero perpetually in search of a return to innocence. Ultimately, McCullough finds that the series' distinction lies less in its faithful re-creation of the history of the WOT than in its evocation of the sense of crises and paranoia that defined the period. McCullough also analyses 24 as a response to television culture in the "post-network" age, characterised by reality TV's populist appeal and visceral content, on the one hand, and sophisticated boutique cable programming ("quality TV"), on the other. McCullough demonstrates that 24 engaged not only with the most pressing issues of world history and the geopolitics of its time, including terrrorism, neoliberalism and the state of exception, but, on the strength of its form and style, also represents significant global trends in television culture. Fans of the show and media history scholars will appreciate this thorough study.

What does it mean to be a friend in Shakespeare's England? In their writings on the subject, Renaissance users of rhetoric would recognize, deploy and appreciate tropes and textual ambiguities in a manner alien to twenty-first century readers. The large body of classical writings on friendship which cropped up on early modern school curricula, especially Cicero's productively paradoxical De Amicitia, provided imagery and scenarios which could be recast by fertile imaginations. This inventive use of tropes and contradictions when writing about friendship has important parallels for queer scholars. The problems and benefits of asserting a 'queer history' are considered here, as is such a history's ambiguous relationship to historicist reading practices. Texts examined include three 1580s conduct books on friendship; John Florio's translation of Montaigne's essay on friendship; later English essays on friendship by Francis Bacon and his contemporaries; the correspondence between Edmund Spenser and Gabriel Harvey; and Shakespeare's Hamlet, King Henry IV and Sonnets.

This is an exciting new collection sure to create ripples throughout Canadian film studies a| an important new addition to the literature on Canadian screen culture. - ZoA" Druick, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University Rain/Drizzle/Fog : Film and Television in Atlantic Canada is the first scholarly study of film and television in Atlantic Canada. With contributors from across the country, the book provides a broad historical overview of film and television in the region, as well as essays on specific topics in contemporary popular television (Trailer Park Boys), early television (Don Messer's Jubilee), and the work of filmmakers such as Bill MacGillivray, Andrea Dorfman, Thom Fitzgerald, and others. This collection is informed by a critical perspective on prevailing stereotypes of culture in the Atlantic region, as well as by history and political-economy debates on the relationship between Atlantic and central Canada. It is also in large part a response to the continued marginalization of regional film and television within the field of Canadian film studies, which has traditionally been dominated by a critical and artistic canon from central Canada and Quebec. Rain/Drizzle/Fog challenges the prevailing tendency to homogenize the complexity of Canadian cultural production and instead celebrates the regional distinctions that make Atlantic film and television unique. With Contributions By: Bruce Barber Andrew Burke Gregory Canning Noreen Golfman Sylvia D. Hamilton Colin Howell MalekKhouri John Mccullough Peter L. Twohig Jen Vanderburg DarrellVarga Pierre Veronneau Jerry White Tracy Y. Zhang

Our Mission provides a four-step process for discovering God's call for your congregation. The mission of the church is the same at all times and in all ages, but takes shape in different ways from one congregation to another. This book assists congregations in writing a mission statement, establishing goals, and creating action plans to carry out those goals.The four strategic planning steps to help your congregation fulfill its mission: STOP to pray and discern if your congregation is fulfilling the will of God LOOK at God's word to make sure it is at the heart of your mission LISTEN to the mission mandate of Christ to establish goals for the congregation GO to implement your action plans with confidence and hope in God's blessings. This book can be used by pastors and congregational leaders for strategic planning and effective management. See Excerpts for reproducible tools that can be downloaded and customized.Who might find it helpfulPastors Church staff members Council presidents Strategic planning teams Management committees Evangelism committees