From an award-winning, innovative poet, a bold reimagination of Arab American womanhood in the modern military age
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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Praise for How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave
“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. Maya Salameh gives everything a voice—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
“Maya Salameh’s HOW TO MAKE AN 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
“The astonishingly inventive forms in How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave stretch our capacity as readers while exploring the shimmering potential of images and verbs: ‘& if hail appears my language might daughter itself into wheat.'”
—Layla Benitez-James