reviewed on January 28, 2026

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One of the worst covers I’ve ever seen, Monk Fruit’s thermal-image child’s face—in utero, almost, and in any case unattributed—nonetheless gives apt visual form to Salem’s propensity for the garish and garrulous. 

 

These poems, post-Ultratalk in their breezy, up-to-the-minute allusiveness, possess at the same time the strange immediacy of the Futurists or French surrealists in translation.  “[W]hat if instead,” Salem asks of a fly in his bathroom, “it’s an advanced drone made by DARPA / to surveil me […] Well, so what! // Privacy won’t make the world / more known to itself, so why stall / the birth of God!” 

 

Packed with references to Instagram and GoFundMe, Bella Hadid and Rashida Tlaib, Patch Adams and the Palestinian genocide, Monk Fruit marshals some of the more farcical aspects of contemporary life toward surprisingly trenchant political and existential reckoning.  As he watches another bee flailing in a glass of orange juice—though he avoids the contemporary poet’s bee-preciosity—Salem arrives at a “new knowledge / that there is no moral distinction between love and evil,” an early claim which anticipates the later recognition that “[t]he whole world’s empty. / It doesn’t matter / what we do to each other.”  The poem “Hi, Mom!” likewise moves from pith to profundity, opening as it does with crossword-puzzle wit: “Might be your first words / after your last words.”

 

Bookended by resignation, Monk Fruit rages in the middle, lamenting, as in the poem “Mao,” not only the war in Gaza but its Palestinian speaker’s own mediated relationship to atrocity:

 

The video started on a dirty floor, a man saying

Bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim under his breath as

the camera panned to a room of four Gazan men

 

shot dead by the Israelis

 

[…]

 

I went about my day.  Later that night,

I watched the new Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

Donald Glover talked shit about Detroit

 

so that was cool.

 

If abrupt in its juxtaposition, the passage is also deliberately deflated, war-weary to the point that this speaker “can’t think of IUDs / without thinking of IEDs,” as he says in another poem.

 

Readers will decide for themselves if that kind of associative move is witty or reckless, but Monk Fruit does indulge at times a slackness in intellect and effort, falling back too easily on pastiche and provocation: “Never Biden.  Student encampments.  Fuck Bernie. / Fuck CNN.  Diasporic Judaism.  Internet outage.”  And Salem tropes too a tired academic racism, imagining “[w]hen white men fade away / in the far future.”  As the last two decades have borne out, such polemics are a losing proposition, and one hopes they are pared down in Salem’s forthcoming Intifadas, selected by Hanif Abdurraqib for Sarabande’s 2024 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry.

 

No doubt, Monk Fruit deliberately pursues a range of modes and linguistic textures.  But the collection is far better when Salem’s restless intellect rises to its abilities, as when he discusses “class consciousness, / class complex” with his therapist, “and she said, alternately, / classist, classicist, classism, / with an unsteadiness I read as unfamiliarity.”  In the poem “CLIT”—long story—Salem implicates himself in those ideological systems he elsewhere indicts, driving a squatter away from “[t]he project house I bought”:

 

One night I found broken glass

and empty beer cans.  I boarded

the window with plywood

 

[…]

 

I gave her $250 to move on,

offered to drive her to a shelter,

call the United Way.

 

Painstaking and increasingly hysterical, Salem’s ministrations locate him within the same ownership society—and the same well-meaning liberalism—he so stridently opposes, making “CLIT” one of the more sensitive social engagements in the book.

 

Monk Fruit has received less attention than Intifadas will get, but 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.