This collection is a delight of dream-logic, old and new mythologies, intimacies, hallucinatory sciences. I will read anything Maya Salameh writes. Mermaid Theory is awash with newnesses, with wonder. - Safia Elhillo

Every sentence in these poems is an opportunity to see something differently, to astonish. - Victoria Chang

From Syria to the house party, there is no landscape that Maya Salameh cannot paint with rigorous spirit, delectable lyric, and a fierce poetics all her own. Mermaid Theory breathes the wonder of myth into the poet’s witnessing; the result is a book that you won’t want to put down, a book that demands to be read aloud with friends, a book that feels a warm room where your best girls are waiting for you to arrive. - Danez Smith

Formally daring and politically incisive, Mermaid Theory reckons with water as history, as present, as divinity, as desire, as fear. This is a poet who sings from the river to the sea. Maya Salameh is a poet who knows that to write is to "sing until the empire is over." - Chen Chen

Mermaid Theory is luscious and lilting, softly chaotic and fierce. I savored every word of this testament to the messy tendrils of desire, sex, war, and creative embodiment. Gorgeous libidinal energy radiates off every page of this exquisite collection. A truly beautiful body of work. - Jasbir Puar
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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. 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

We need a new poetry lexicon and Maya Salameh brings it. Her writing is an unexpected cousin in the colonized and capitalism-razed city, bewildering and divining things you’ve never heard but want to learn. . . Prepare to be stretched and delighted. - Mohja Kahf

The turns and swerves the poems make are astonishing; the expectations they upend are remarkable. Salameh's is an intelligent, joyous, dynamic poetry that celebrates form and body, pushing and reinventing. - Fady Joudah

Maya Salameh’s How to Make 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. Point to any page and you’ll say psalm. You’ll say, not dead. You’ll see: future. - Philip Metres