Terence Culleton poetry, essays, short stories
My third book of poems, A Tree and Gone (Future Cycle Press), is now out in Kindle and print format on Amazon (https://amzn.to/3qDrRqN) as well as right here. To order from my webpage, just click on the “Shop” button above. Proceeds from all books purchased through the website will be donated to a local food pantry.
Recent News: Mudfish will be including my voice poem “Race Relations” in Mudfish 24, and Rosette Maleficarum has published “Delirium Tree,” which is also scheduled for publication along with four other of my Crazy Rainey poems in Caveat Lector. The U.K. journal Orbis just published two pieces, “Fox” and “Parkway Garden,” in its Autumn issue (#206), and the Alabama Literary Review has accepted another two pieces, “Carmine House” and “After Rage.” Also, honored to have two poems, "Ham" and "Caught" in Sparks of Calliope. "Caught" is an ekphrastic piece, and "Ham" is for foodies, sort of. Both are formal. You can read them at: https://sparksofcalliope.com/2024/01/23/two-poems-by terence-culleton, where you can also read two other pieces, "Along the Shoulder" and "The Nightingale's a Literary Bird." "Nightingale" first appeared in Westward Quarterly's 2024 edition. The spring issue of the UK magazine Littoral contains five poems of mine, including “Driving Past a Dogwood Copse in Bloom,” “Didgeridoo,” “Walking the Dog,” “Post-Positivist Death Cathexis in a Strip Mall Parking Lot,” and “Sorry.” If you’d like to read them, click the link below, scroll down a bit to the cover (Spring 2024), and click the rightward arrows to page sixteen. My poems are on pages 16 through 20. Here's the link: https://littoralpressuk.jimdofree.com/littoral-magazine/
Upcoming: Wendy Steginsky and I will be hosting the 36th annual Bucks Quarterly Meeting Peace Fair Poetry Reading on Saturday September 21st 11.30 a.m. to 1 pm at Buckingham Friends School in Lahaska PA. Scheduled readers include current Bucks County Poet Laureate Tara Tamburello, as well as several past and future laureates and poets extraordinaire. An open reading will follow.
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BOOKS
A Tree and Gone (Poems)
Eternal Life
(Poems)
A Communion of Saints
(Poems)
COMMENTARY
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About A Communion of Saints:
"As the editor of two journals primarily dedicated to formal and metrical poetry, it is unusual for me to read a set of poems and feel that I am in the presence of that rare bird, a poet who not only understands the proper mechanics of meter and form , but who can use them to produce great poetry. Terry Culleton is such a poet. . . . Culleton gives free rein to his lively imagination and mischievous sense of humor, but although the poems are often wildly funny, they usually serve to elucidate some nugget of philosophy or spiritual angst, and many resonate with an almost unearthly beauty. . . . I am sure we will be seeing much more of his work in both local and national venues."
-- Anna Evans, editor of Barefoot Muse and The Raintown Review and author of The Unacknowledges Legislator and Under Dark Waters: The Sinking of The Titanic
"For years I have applauded Terry Culleton’s hilarious accounts of fictitious saints he has brought into existence through his abundant imagination. But despite his glibness in telling about "St. Apneus the Sleeper" who, on finding God “inaccessible to prayer,” vowed to “sleep his life away," or about St. Anorexius who subsists on his miserly diet (“a dot of cottage cheese, a molecule of milk, a nice afterthought of Cantonese Duck or Thousand-Year-Old Egg”), his seriousness of purpose is never in doubt. Reading Culleton’s poems I am struck by the awe and reverence he extends to his solitary seekers in their quest for the divine. Their self-doubt and self-deprivation—their willingness to give their lives up to something greater than themselves—resonates during these secular times of texting and instant messages, when religious devotion seems quaint and peculiar and out of fashion."
-- Joe Chelius, author of Crossing State Lines and The Art of Acquiescence.
About A Tree and Gone (forthcoming from Future Cycle Press):
"[Culleton's]poems are rife with motion, often of waves and of winds, but also of a bird dropping that lands on a leaf of chickweed or of a dog that we see “pitch and zag / in wafts and skirls of blindingly bright snow.” That motility might seem at odds with such a traditional form as the sonnet, but there’s a blessed rage for order here, and the artifice is often pressured by the changes that these poems document. [T]he skillful control is reminiscent of Richard Wilbur."
-- Temple Cone, author of Guzzle, The Broken Meadow, and No Loneliness.
BIO
Terence Culleton lives in Bucks County PA, just outside Philadelphia, where he's taught writing and literature for forty years. Mr. Culleton is the author of two published books of verse, A Communion of Saints (2011) and Eternal Life (2015), both published by Anaphora Literary Press. His third collection, A Tree and Gone, is due out in 2021 from Future Cycle Press.
Mr. Culleton publishes in diverse magazines and reviews, and reads widely throughout the Philadelphia region, as well as in northeastern PA and New York. His work has been featured on radio and cable TV shows in Pennsylvania and New York. and on
NPR, and he has won a number of prizes and awards both for his poetry and his teaching.
His work has also been set to music and recorded by Vermont composer Don Jamison for his book and CD Far Heaven, as well as by Darryl Harper and Onus for their CD Stories in Real Time.
CONTACT
For media inquiries, readings, and review copies
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