Terence Culleton poetry, essays, short stories
My fourth book of poems, Message From a Floating Dock, is now out through White Violet Press, the formalist imprint of Kelsay Books. It's available for purchase here or at kelsaybooks.com or amazon.com. You can purchase here by clicking on the “Shop” button above. Proceeds from all books go to the Penndel Food Pantry.
Recent News: In the publishing area, acceptances pending publication include: "Marie, Lit Up," due out in Alabama Literary Review 2026; "Ugly Jug" and "Roto Duck," forthcoming in Eunoia Review; "The Day Proust Died" and "At John Neumann's Shrine," due out soon in Philadelphia Poets; "Boxcars," "Note to Self," "The Infant of Prague," and "Wednesday Night Visit," slated for a future issue of Birmingham Poetry Review; "Valentine's Day," due out soon in Abstract Magazine; "Beached," recently taken by The Avalon Literary Review; "Catechesis," slated for issue #17 of Marrow; and, finally, "Ice Cream Parlor" and "Morning," to be included in a future issue of The Stickman Review. Recent publications are: "St. Peter Celestine To a Mourning Dove," which recently appeared in Eclectica and can be read at: www.eclectica.org/v30n1/culleton.html AND Five pieces in Balestra Magazine: "Acolytes," "Heaven Is," "Hollywood Hannah Farms the Yard," "Jogging: Winter Trees," and "Man Qua Dog." You can read them at: https::/balestramagazine.substack.com/i/198609106/terence-culleton
Upcoming: Wendy Steginsky and I will be hosting the 39th annual Bucks Quarterly Meeting Peace Fair Poetry Reading on Saturday September 26, 11.30 am to 1 pm, at Buckingham Friends School in Lahaska PA. Scheduled readers include current Bucks County Poet Laureate Madeline Marriott, 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)
Message From a Floating Dock
COMMENTARY
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:
"[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.
About Message From a Floating Dock:
In Message From A Floating Dock, Terence Culleton finds in language itself a means of preservation and renewal as fresh as its point of origin in the love, sorrow, and yearning that seized him as a child: “I’d live to have/that life again.” And so he does in these lyrics of exhilarating sonic invention and keen observation. Moments of fleeting perception, gather into a narrative stream, revealing how what’s ephemeral, when recollected, can have intention and direction, but “dreams stay as they are, shine as they will.”
—J.C. Todd, author, Beyond Repair
In Message From a Floating Dock, Terence Culleton explores with wit and deep reverence the random and transient nature of everyday life: a leashed dog chasing a hare; a strip mall ravaged by a storm; an abandoned suitcase: “a mess/of shredded straps/and moldy pocket-pleats.” But time is fluid, and the speaker also returns to what is remembered—childhood, the early loss of his mother, an understanding of faith, “its minor angels/that they are real or loved for real.” These poems, written in form, keenly observed, and rich in language, celebrate both the “ungovernable” and the beauty of life; in them Culleton finds “the world a place to sing about/no matter what.”
—Cheryl Baldi, author of Cormorants at Dusk
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.
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