“Salem’s poems are must-reads, proceeding with a cleverly calculated off-the-cuff quality and a relentless, dry, weird wit. They spin absurdist nightmares of art and history, of links and screenshots and mediated engagement with atrocity, of the genocide against Palestinians and the many attendant erasures. Salem writes, astutely and acutely, of belonging, unbelonging, and the possibilities and impossibilities of solidarity. These poems are, in short, essential.”

— Natalie Shapero

“Edward Salem’s first book is monumental. The collection reads at 180 bpm and keeps your heart rate there. The poems are inescapably memorizable, devastating, and tattooable. The voice is precise, imaginative, shattering, and somehow hysterical. This is an urgent book, a book to hold close, a book to memorize, a book to underline and line the inside of your eyelids. Read & repeat. ”

— sam sax

“Intimately provocative yet subtle. . . It’s also funny.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

“In Monk Fruit, Edward Salem’s sadomasochist poetic proclivities render death & sex as simultaneous, cyclic events beneath the shelling. ‘I use pliers to stretch your nipples / past the Apartheid Wall to Cairo.’ On loop, Monk Fruit’s  death hedonism stretches across dream & wakefulness infiltrating every moment with the veracity of life & death as Palestinian. Salem’s razor wire sharp turns mark the reader with both the degradation of displacement & the inescapable complicity in gen0cide: ‘you were there / for all of it.’”

— Andrea Abi-Karam

“Salem puts on display succinctly, humorously and, dare I say, beautifully, that life, with its attendant highs and lows, joys and sorrows, is really just a game—a deadly serious game.”

— Hayan Charara

“Salem has a confiding way of laying in details that clocks contemporary bleakness and absurdity with a sensitively tuned wit. . .  Salem’s facility for storytelling, as well as his experience with direct action, shine through. . .”

— Chantal McStay

In Monk Fruit, Edward Salem prowls the edges of prophecy and punch line, like Rumi on acid. Edward Salem is a poet who knows the void but refuses its totalizing darkness, choosing instead to light matches in its depths. Salem reveals, then expands, worlds with each poem. From Detroit to Gaza, the Big Bang to whatever calamity comes next, he reports from far ahead of the curve, beyond the current cosmic crunch with “poise and peculiarity” (Ottessa Moshfegh). A thrilling debut collection and punk treatise, Monk Fruit bypasses ideology, finds a side door, and rearranges the furniture.