Released 30th, April, 2024 // 34 pages // 978-1-916938-16-8 // RRP £8.99
Something Man-Made Is Here and It Is Dangerous is a pamphlet of poetry that finds humour, beauty, and fascination in the post-human. Stefan Mohamed explores landscapes that might be unfriendly to us but friendly to others, and in doing so plays around with the strange voices and concepts that might spring from that. This is a remarkable work that engages with science-fiction, scientific language, eco-poetry, the evolution – and loss – of language, and the thought processes of abstract beings.
PRAISE for Something Man-Made Is Here and It Is Dangerous:
‘This place / may never be a garden again but you / might as well try while you’re here’, says the speaker of one of Stefan Mohamed’s poems, the line break on but you reminding the reader that there is still hope for our actions even ‘in a library / of bones’. Mohamed’s poems are structurally, even ontologically unafraid, braiding language from sci-tech & idiolect alike into universe-songs that bring to mind Will Alexander cosmologies, Prynne tunes. Stefan Mohamed has scored a music meet for our various & variegated world, its processes & realities, its ‘sound full of / blood’.
— Tom Snarsky
Something Man-Made Is Here and It Is Dangerous is a truly inventive piece of work. These poems dig deep into dark places– the hostile architecture and unknown bedrock of our never-quite-post nuclear future, and the wider reaches of the expanding universe. Here language holds together and falls apart in a way that calls us to imagine our own beautiful destruction. The world and its words are defamiliarised with tragic and blistering wit and even time becomes unhooked from its moorings - ‘have you always been here / often’.
— Suzannah Evans
ABOUT Stefan Mohamed:
Stefan Mohamed is an award-winning writer, performer and creative writing tutor. He is the author of four novels and four books of poetry. He is based in Bristol.
