The Revelation Tapes - by Stefan Mohamed (Paperback)

About the Book

The Revelation Tapes by Stefan Mohamed unfolds as a salvaged transmission: a film-show remastered from corroded cassettes, screened in the ruins of a drowned future, its overture barked by a game-show host of the apocalypse.

Book Synopsis

The Revelation Tapes by Stefan Mohamed unfolds as a salvaged transmission: a film-show remastered from corroded cassettes, screened in the ruins of a drowned future, its overture barked by a game-show host of the apocalypse. Across seven acts a loose band of kids persevere through ecological collapse, blag their way into a nightclub at the end of the world, and meet God at the end of a metaphorical bullet. Mohamed braids manic comedy with grief, moving from prose tirade to scattered concrete text to group-chat syntax as he works through parasocial fixation, the remix of memory and self, and the wreckage of the overexamined mind. Mohamed's poetry loops back on itself like the river that opens and closes it, finding tenderness inside the noise.

Review Quotes

Stefan Mohamed is a brilliant poet because he knows the balance between restraint and excess, the notes of sadness and anger required to make something truly, cathartically funny, and the precise timing of a distorted buzz phrase. And he's a master of the latter, taking every one of our contemporary solecisms and platitudes and feeding them through the dream blender of poetry. Where The Revelation Tapes feels like a real evolution of an already distinctive style, though, is in its unflinching portrayal of a cultural and literal apocalypse; its elliptical and theological narrative; its infuriating, loveable and hope-laden kids who are above all else, not all right. A joyful and furious collection, and his best so far.

- Luke Kennard

If the kids are our future, then these poems follow those born into end times, searching the darkness of the unknown universe for ways in which the world can still be magical. Stefan Mohamed is an unparalleled phrase maker, and this collection is rich with typographic and repetitious play that gives these poems their dark musicality. At times tender, jubilant and unsettling, this is a deep future that feels like it is on our doorsteps, or maybe festering in our understairs cupboards on obsolete media; something that happened while we were pretending the end is future tense.

- Suzannah Evans Furnass

A mesmeric and sprawling work of alarming talent and uniqueness ... I was gripped by the storytelling, wit and complexity of this book.

- Jake Wild Hall