Monk Fruit

Edward Salem’s first book Monk Fruit 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.

Death is predetermined by the state of hell. Viscera is torn open by the external violences of shameless colonialism. 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 revealing 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.

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.

Intimately provocative yet subtle. . . there is a vulnerability to the voice that I feel deserves to be acknowledged and encouraged.