Monk Fruit - by Edward Salem (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Salem's poems are must-reads, proceeding with a cleverly calculated off-the-cuff quality and a relentless, dry, weird wit."
--Natalie Shapero

"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."
--Sam Sax

"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

"If this is the future of political poetry, I welcome it."--David Starkey, California Review of Books
"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.'"
--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

"Intimately provocative yet subtle. . . there is a vulnerability to the voice that I feel deserves to be acknowledged and encouraged."
--Ottessa Moshfegh, in praise of "Sacrilege"

About the Author

Edward Salem's second poetry collection, Intifadas (2026), was selected for the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. He is also the author of Monk Fruit (Nightboat, 2025). Salem won the 2022 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and BOMB's 2021 Fiction Contest. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He is the co-founder of City of Asylum/Detroit, a nonprofit that provides safe-haven fellowships to writers and artists in exile who have been persecuted for their work.