Monk Fruit

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.

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.

Monk Fruit plays in the space between the deadly serious and the seriously deadpan. In Salem’s poems, death can be a social media phenomenon, an opportunity for a bizarre performance art piece involving bungee jumps and formaldehyde, or flatulence that is physically painful to hold in.

The poems of Monk Fruit resist, in diction and attention, the impulse for a high lyricism. The book softens its own far-reaching intelligence with idiosyncratic obsessions, the cultural (pop and otherwise) ornaments of the everyday.

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.

If this is the future of political poetry, I welcome it.

Monk Fruit speaks to the immediacy of our current moment while also taking a 250,000-year lens to humanity, inviting readers to interrogate their place in it all—even, perhaps, without losing optimism entirely.