"If you're feeling nauseated in this era of Instagram's atrocity/frivolity juxtapositions, sick of grasping after agency as speech, protest, voting (and other opportunities for impact) are sabotaged, this debut collection is one I might prescribe like a gastric lavage." -- Rosalie Moffett, Los Angeles Review of Books "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 "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." -- Christian Wessels, Cleveland Review of Books "If this is the future of political poetry, I welcome it." -- David Starkey, California Review of Books "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.

" -- Christopher Kempf, Preposition " 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".