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MERMAID THEORY

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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Reviews

What I enjoy about Maya Salameh's poems in Mermaid Theory is the surprise. Every sentence in these poems is an opportunity to see something differently, to astonish. Just a few examples: "in the house we speak 3 languages but grooming's the first," "I'll transcribe myself/to bricks," or "it's November now/& the noun under the sink is screaming again." Formally inventive, imagistically surprising, and intellectually capacious and nuanced, Mermaid Theory skillfully explores mythology, Arab American identity and womanhood, faith, and so much more.

Victoria Chang
Author of OBIT and 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. At times sexy and lush as a Prince song, at other times singing in the righteous harmonies of necessary revolutions, Mermaid Theory breathes the wonder of myth into the poet’s witnessing of the worlds around her and the result is a book that you won’t want to put down, a book that demands to be read aloud with friends, a book that feels a warm room where your best girls are waiting for you to arrive. And everywhere here there is love, so much love that the poet must confess “of all/ my prayers you are my favorite.”  So much love humming off these pages that “this song/ lasts longer than the mountains & all the horses nearby can smell it.” A truly fantastic collection that begs to be savored over and over. 

Danez Smith
Author of Homie and Don’t Call Us Dead 

Formally daring and politically incisive, Mermaid Theory reckons with water as history, as present, as divinity, as desire, as fear, as at once “a vast archive” and “an immense grave.” Refusing cultural amnesia and feel-good liberal sentimentality, these poems read “the dead’s grammar” and praise a “ravenous love for life.” 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. Maya Salameh is a poet who knows that to write is to “sing until the empire is over.”

Chen Chen
Author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities 

Maya Salameh’s Mermaid Theory is a precise and intimate book about girlhood, the body, and what it means to grow up in a world that is neither kind nor forgiving. These poems move between memory, inheritance, and the daily negotiations of becoming, holding tenderness and harm in the same frame. Salameh writes with clarity about girlhood as both a site of imagination and constraint, where myth, family, and history quietly shape the self. I love this book and am dazzled by its sharpness, its humor, and its depth.  

Noor Hindi
Author of DEAR GOD. DEAR BONES. DEAR YELLOW.

This collection is a delight of dream-logic, old and new mythologies, intimacies, hallucinatory sciences. I will read anything Maya Salameh writes. Mermaid Theory is awash with newnesses, with wonder.

Safia Elhillo
Author of GIRLS THAT NEVER DIE and The January Children

Mermaid Theory is luscious and lilting, softly chaotic and fierce. I savored every word of this testament to the messy tendrils of desire, sex, war, and creative embodiment. Gorgeous libidinal energy radiates off every page of this exquisite collection. A truly beautiful body of work. 

Jasbir Puar
Author of Terrorist Assemblages and The Right to Maim

Maya Salameh is an intelligent, daring poet sculpting her art between the irreverent and the experimental. Mermaid Theory propels the imaginary toward movement. This is cinema in verse. 

Fady Joudah
Author of […] and Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance

How to Make An Algorithm In The Microwave

The divine and the digital achieve a distinct corporality in Maya Salameh’s HOW TO MAKE AN ALGORITHM IN THE MICROWAVE, winner of the 2022 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. Layering prayer with code, Salameh brings supposedly unassailable technological constructs like algorithm, recursion, and loop into conversation with the technologies of womanhood, whether liner, lipstick, or blood. She speaks back to the algorithm (“a computer’s admission to blood”) which acts simultaneously as warden, confidant, and data thief.

Salameh boldly examines how an Arab woman survives the digitization of her body—experimenting with form to create an intimate collage of personal and neocolonial histories, fearlessly insinuating herself into the scripts that would otherwise erase her, and giving voice to the full mess of ritual.

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Reviews

How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave upends every way I’ve ever used the term ‘multilingual.’ These poems crackle with language, a cacophony of Arabic and English and French and code and formal invention and song lyrics and photographs and footnotes. Everything is given a voice in these poems—speakers across many comings of age, cities, pop stars, the digital world—and the result is lush and orchestral, searing and intelligent and incredibly fun. We are so lucky. I am so lucky, to read and learn from Maya Salameh, luminous inventor, luminous interrogator.”

Safia Elhillo
Author of The January Children and Girls That Never Die

Maya Salameh’s How to Make Algorithm in the Microwave carries the echo of the wild diasporic future in the late American empire of now. Employing computer code, Punnett squares, experimental prayers, and anarchic prose, Salameh writes herself a homeland made of a language redolent of celebrated flesh, a zajal between Fairouz and Amy Winehouse. ‘I pull at the serifs on words,’ she writes in ‘Case Study on Me & Sunlight’: ‘the old meanings / of rain. there are still some joints in/ my elbows I have never / read.’ Point to any page and you’ll say psalm. You’ll say, not dead. You’ll see: future.

Philip Metres
Author of Sand Opera and Shrapnel Maps

We need a new poetry lexicon—a new way of moleculing the poem on the page, even—and Maya Salameh brings it. We need all the strange Arabic-diasporic ways we can find for being in this terrible and joyful and often frighteningly banalizing world, and Salameh’s poems are a generous find. Her writing is an unexpected cousin in the colonized and capitalism-razed city, bewildering and divining things you’ve never heard but want to learn. . . . Prepare to be stretched and delighted.

Mohja Kahf
Author of E-mails from Scheherazad and Hagar Poems