From an award-winning, innovative poet, a bold reimagination of Arab American womanhood in the modern military age
In her second full-length collection, Maya Salameh offers a profound exploration of Arab American identity, weaving together themes of myth, science, and cultural heritage. This daring collection deploys psychological evaluation forms, ritual incantations, and captivating visual poetry.
Salameh transcends simple narratives of shame or violence to offer a nuanced portrayal of identity, exploring both the privileges and heartbreaks of diasporic exile. Her multilingual poetry bridges Arabic and English, enriching the poems’ sonic texture. Salameh scrutinizes established academic and cultural narratives, inviting readers to rethink their own understandings of history and identity.
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“I will read anything Maya Salameh writes. This collection is a delight of dream-logic, old and new mythologies, intimacies, hallucinatory sciences.”
—Safia Elhillo, author of Girls That Never Die: Poems
“Every sentence in these poems is an opportunity to see something differently, to astonish.”
—Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World
“From Syria to the house party, there is no landscape that Maya Salameh cannot paint with rigorous spirit, delectable lyric, and a fierce poetics all her own.”
—Danez Smith, author of Bluff
“This is a poet who’s not waiting around for the imperialist death machine to declare who counts as a person or what counts as art. This is a poet who sings from the river to the sea.”
—Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency
“A precise and intimate book about what it means to grow up in a world that is neither kind nor forgiving.”
—Noor Hindi, co-editor of Heaven Looks like Us
“Luscious and lilting, softly chaotic and fierce.”
—Jasbir Puar, author of The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability
“Irreverent and experimental. This is cinema in verse.”
—Fady Joudah, author of Ellipsis
Other books by Maya Salameh
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Mermaid Theory
by Maya Salameh