Monk Fruit

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 (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.

"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"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"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.” —Andrea Abi-Karam"On the surface, Edward Salem’s poems intimate that he is a poet who has given up on the seriousness of poetry (and perhaps life itself). However, if that’s your final take, then you would not only be deceived but maybe also a bit foolish. 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. It is this perspective, along with Salem’s keen sense of how to translate image and experience into viscerally felt insight, that makes the impression these poems leave so strong and lasting."—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"