Ellie Black's Revelator transforms shards of language, pop culture, and literature into tightly wound poems of excess and incantation.
Chosen by Dorothea Lasky as the winner of the 2026 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Ellie Black's debut collection, Revelator, glitches and falters, iterates and alludes. This is a book concerned deeply with what's real, what's fake, and what's fantasy. With equal parts humor and horror, this fragmented, oracular collection explores the consequences of the increasingly blurry digital-physical landscape in which we find ourselves and its relationship to power, control, and what we worship. These poems transform shards of language, pop culture, and literature into a tightly wound poetics of excess engaged with an incantatory attention to sound. Famous women, teenage girls, movie characters, and reluctant prophets are victims, villains, and victors, sometimes all at once. Here, boundaries blur between high and low. Angels visit and animatronics come to life. Sylvia Plath, Lee Edelman, and Evil Dead II share space in a single poem. Revelation, this collection proposes, exists at the limits of confessional poetry, religious confession, the dramatic twist, and the divine promise of an apocalyptic ending. Revelator offers up a mirror to how we invent and perform ourselves on stages, on screens, and in our lives.
