Mermaid Theory: Poems

by Maya Salameh

Overview

A collection of lyrical and experimental poems, Mermaid Theory redefines the page to visually and textually enact the struggles and celebrations of Arab-American femininity.

In her second full-length collection, Maya Salameh offers a profound exploration of Arab-American identity, weaving together themes of myth, science, and cultural heritage. Salameh’s innovative poetic forms blur the lines between ancient myth and psychological scholarship.

Mermaid Theory boldly reimagines Arab-American womanhood in the modern military age, deploying psychological evaluation forms, ritual incantations, and other texts as visual lyric poems to deepen the reader’s engagement. Salameh transcends simple narratives of shame or violence to offer a nuanced portrayal of identity, exploring both the privileges and heartbreaks of diasporic exile. Her multilingual poetry bridges Arabic and English, enriching the poems’ sonic texture. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798888906545
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Publication date:	04/07/2026
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	88

About the Author

Maya Salameh is the author of How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave (University of Arkansas Press, 2022), winner of the 2022 Etel Adnan Prize, and the chapbook rooh (Paper Nautilus Press, 2020). Salameh has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, and the President’s Committee for the Arts and Humanities. She has served as a National Student Poet, America’s highest honor for youth poets, and a Community Organizer for the Institute for Diversity in the Arts. Her work has appeared in The Offing, Mizna, Poetry, Gulf Coast, and The Rumpus, among others. She is based in Los Angeles, California.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave

“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. Maya Salameh gives everything a voice—speakers across many comings of age, cities, pop stars, the digital world—and 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, author of The January Children

“Maya Salameh’s HOW TO MAKE AN 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. ‘I pull at the serifs on words,’ she writes in ‘Case Study on Me & Sunlight’: ‘the old meanings / of rain. there are still some joints in / my elbows I have never / read.’ Point to any page and you’ll say, psalm. You’ll say, not dead. You’ll see: future.”
—Philip Metres, author of Sand Opera and Shrapnel Maps

“The astonishingly inventive forms in How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave stretch our capacity as readers while exploring the shimmering potential of images and verbs: ‘& if hail appears my language might daughter itself into wheat.'”
—Layla Benitez-James

From the Publisher