Speech Acts is NOW AVAILABLE from Black Lawrence Press  or here at Amazon.

Laura McCullough's book Speech Acts lives up to its title-- so  many of these poems
take  as their starting point the social occasion of a speaker wondering how to talk--naughty or nice-like?,  over-educated, or heartfelt?; the results are bright with velocity, lexical intelligence, and a distinctive fusion of headiness and carnality. McCullough's poems  are manic, heartfelt and humane; and they crackle with  what the Reverend Marvin Gaye would have called  "textual healing."                                                                                 
                                                                                                                                       Tony Hoagland

 “Is language our sexiest proboscis?” asks Laura McCullough, then responds with  unabashed word-slinging to bolster her rhetorical affirmation. If her lines charge each poem with vibrancy—“it’s all in the syntax”—it’s because McCullough knows “how good secrets can be handled right, / by the various names we give them.” Her enthusiasms for Adam’s task as well as for Eve’s sensuality provide Speech Acts with a rollicking measure.  “You gotta like it / to do it well,” McCullough half-jokes, and her pleasures become our own in this provocative  and wildly entertaining book.                                                                                           
                                                                                                                                                          Michael Waters

  The word “acts” in Laura McCullough's Speech Acts is as much verb as it is noun. What her speech does in these stunning poems is restlessly sift through language and experience alike, searching for words, lips, hearts, and truths that might just keep one from spinning off into the coldest, emptiest reaches of being. Bold, witty, erotic, and provocative, McCullough's poems re-imagine for our time E. M. Forster's tremendous artistic and humane injunction: “only connect!”

                                                                                                                                                               Fred Marchant
 
The poems in Laura McCullough’s Speech Acts search deep into the interior of language to recover and explore the resources of our most intimate lives. It is that rare collection which disassembles the very constructions of thought itself (while simultaneously embracing the reader with surprisingly tender gestures). Speech Acts refuses to shy away from the difficult, the necessary. It recognizes the tenuous qualities of the moment and lifts them up with reverence. It is a collection which offers fresh insights with each reading.                                         
                                                                                                                       Brian Turner

Sample Poem:
                                                 THE ORTHOGRAPHY OF PROVOCATION    (first published in Prairie Schooner)
 
I wanted a cement truck in this poem,

but didn’t have one, and if I had there

wouldn’t have been room for the tree

I was trying to grow, the one made
 
of cells which aren’t the smallest unit

of meaning or even attention, but a cell

will simply have to do. All of us are

perturbed and perturbing, the perturbations

sometimes lovely as birds lifting from

the head of a tree in unison or lovely, yes,

let’s admit this, as the rumbling nostrums

of that cement truck grinding down the road

past the old, grand trees lining it, the flocks

of birds all provoked from their rest. We
 
take flight, too, feeling palliated momentarily,

and you take my hand across the membrane

of this poem, and, for a minute, I understand

the word placebo and am grateful to be stuck

in it, rooted once more to the only street

on which I’ve ever known how to live.

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