“If you’re feeling nauseated in this era of Instagram’s atrocity/frivolity juxtapositions, sick of grasping after agency as speech, protest, voting (and other opportunities for impact) are sabotaged, this debut collection is one I might prescribe like a gastric lavage.”
—Rosalie Moffett, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Salem requires his readers to rethink how and why they come to (Palestinian-American) poetry in the first place, and what quiet cultural-political structures have a vested interest in Palestinian-American verse being either epiphanic or redemptive. It’s the refusal of those poetic strategies, and thus the often-darkly-funny fuck-you to American liberalism, that make Monk Fruit such a distinctive and valuable collection.”
—Noah Warren, Fence

“A book grounded on our brazen, bloodstained planet, whose chief subjects include Salem’s disregarded hometown of Detroit, the genocide of Palestinians and rhyming horrors across history, all the language that offends upstanding audiences and all the violence that apparently doesn’t.”
—Christopher Spaide, Literary Hub

“Nightboat has launched an important new poet and aesthetic project here. The book is simultaneously hilarious and hard-edged, bathetic and heartbreaking, and I would not be surprised to find Salem’s stature rising considerably over the coming months.”
—Christopher Kempf, Preposition

“If this is the future of political poetry, I welcome it.”
—David Starkey, California Review of Books

“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, author of Stay Dead

“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, author of Pig

“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, author of Villainy

“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, author of Something Sinister

“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

“Operating intertextually with a Godhead in its poetics of negation, [Salem] manages, paradoxically, to build possibility through persistent negations. Each time a line of argument becomes discernible, it’s quickly and forcefully wrought back around its own tail, creating coils of energy in refusal.”
—Ian U Lockaby, Poetry Daily