A Clearing in the Mind’s Petrified Forest

In ‘Monk Fruit,’ Edward Salem’s poetry presents ‘a wild ride of touchpoints’ that serve together as a ‘gastric lavage’ for the trauma-fatigued reader.

By Rosalie MoffettFebruary 7, 2026

• Poetry

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, but only if it would leave you “smiling and unsmiling, smiling and unsmiling,” as Edward Salem writes in the poem “Landing in Israel.” Monk Fruit (2025) takes us through a wild ride of touchpoints: dreams, hallucinations, torture, therapy, Gaza, the Burlington Coat Factory, sadomasochistic sex adventures and misadventures, Detroit, and the creation of matter in the big bang. In doing so, it builds a cosmology around the gaze, including the American gaze (its biases and distractions), the internet, the self, drones, God, God’s absence, and time.

Perhaps it was the line in the bio describing Salem, a Palestinian American, as “formerly an artist working in performance, street interventions, and experimental film,” or perhaps it was because I had been noting the appetite of the global audience for a certain kind of poignant Palestinian performance, that I lingered, in this mordant disco ball of a collection, over the poems that bluntly and often hilariously skewer that expectation. Maybe you will find unsettling, as I do, the difference between the ca. 1300 sense of the word perform, “carry into effect,” and the ca. 1600 addition to its meaning, “to act or represent on or as on a stage.” I don’t dismiss performance as “mere,” but in that conflicted etymology, I catch an echo of Auden’s oft-amputated line “poetry makes nothing happen” (a claim the more Zen-inflected poems in Monk Fruit might revel in) and also a whiff of a cultural trajectory that goes from working toward justice to social media expressions of how much we care about it.

Unsettlingly regurgitated in Monk Fruit is our “terminally online” present, where moral capital is generated by online performances of virtue, which, in turn, allows for actual capital to be mined from those performances. In “Dabls,” the speaker observes the jockeying economy of the GoFundMe: “We’re learning how to ride the internet / like an unbroken horse. […] Sometimes / a famous poet will give $500 and leave / their name up.” The poem closes with a craven tableau that scholars of the future might study, à la the Dead Sea Scrolls:

screen shots
of a poet’s donations or Gazan faces
or bejeweled, mirrored mosaics
falling from rotten cladding.

Many of the poems in Monk Fruit seem to have found the border that importance shares with triviality, and are flailing it, as one might a rope at a CrossFit gym. This border is spotlit in virtual spaces and also in the bathroom, a setting that recurs, serving the poet’s particular sense of humor. The bathroom is an apt site to raise questions about what is seemly and what can be shown or hidden. In the poem “Why Stall” (an indicative pun), the speaker closely examines a fly and proposes that it might be “an advanced drone made by DARPA / to surveil me in my bathroom.” Whatever vulnerability and distress arise from this loss of the ability to feel fully safe, alone, and out of view is subducted by one of the book’s signature tonal whiplashes: “Well, so what! // Privacy won’t make the world / more known to itself, so why stall / the birth of God!” This explosion of scope, which displaces the self and its pain in favor of a cavalier declaration of spiritual largesse, is elsewhere complicated as the figure of God (and what God sees or knows or values) undergoes various costume changes. “The Palestinian Chair” opens with an echo of the Gospel of Thomas, which quickly extrapolates:

God said (and already you can tell
I’m making this up),
If you lift a rock, I am there.
If you lift a finger, I am there.
If Blackwater rips out your fingernails,
I am there.

The horrific injustices at which God claims to be present accrete and extend in time before arriving at a figure distant from the torture and starvation, one who “scarf[s] down” food “at Yemen Café in Hamtramck.” The voice says to them, and to all:

After life is over,
you realize that

You were there.
For all of it.
It was all you.

Thus, the poem closes with an indisputable castigation of complicity, unmitigated by distance and made exemplary by the notes, which detail the torture device’s path from the Israeli military into the hands of interrogators at Abu Ghraib. But remarkable, too, is the way the perspective and voice are transformed by the path of the poem. If, because they are “made up,” we are initially disinclined to believe the claims, the poem’s closure effects a veracity that feels akin to divine authority, even as the God (improvised or not) flickers into the mortal individual—even as the elsewhere morphs into the here, and the myriad obligations of presence settle onto the you.

The thinning membrane between here and elsewhere is conjured in yet another bathroom. “Curb Your Enthusiasm” recounts the episode of the eponymous series in which Larry David resolves to maximize his previously wasted peeing time by taping the Gettysburg Address above the toilet so he can memorize it. The poem’s speaker, by contrast, resolves to use that time to memorize, from his phone, “(insert genocidal image here).” There are multiple collisions happening in this poem, not just between minuscule private moments and the massiveness of genocide but also between what we’re shown and what we’re not, and between two emotional impulses. The commitment of images to memory is a form of care; it offers a stay against nothingness and resists the collapse of mass atrocity into the unfathomable.

At the same time, the parenthetical that withholds the image—that suggests any might do—pulls in the opposite direction; it enacts the trivializing degradations of meaning that come when the phone provides an infinite-seeming procession of genocidal evidence, interspersed with ads and banality. Furthermore, this act refuses the poem’s task of image-making, refuses the bewildering work of choosing which and who should be made an exemplar by the poem, and perhaps reclaims a blip of privacy, not for the speaker but for those whose deprivations include even that. In so doing, the absent picture declines to perform and turns the moral and poetic task of intention and care on the reader, as if to say, “It’s not like you don’t have these images. You choose one.”

Throughout, opposites fuse and layer to jostle the reader out of even the simplest categorical understandings, the most steady and calcified of moral hierarchies—divisions of good and evil, meaning and insignificance, something and nothing—in a way that seems to release a mind from the pain or exhaustion of holding these fundamentals against the weather of moral chaos. Instead of endeavoring to render the heartrending, or arguing the heart should be rent—an appallingly futile endeavor, it turns out—many of these poems instead adopt the inconceiving gaze of an alien, or a curious god, whose distance and vast sense of time leave them untormented by outrages of the present. This scope is evoked in “Kalpas,” titled after a Buddhist concept that ratchets wide the mind’s scale of time, offering “a single breath / expanding a speck into the cosmos, / contracting the cosmos down to a speck.” Certainly, suffering is rendered unmistakably (as in “Palestinian Chair”), and in Monk Fruit, there are contractions from the vastness. That is to say, we have the intimacy and attention to the articles and anguish of the small self, like the ties to mother or father or lover, the arenas of bathroom and bedroom. But it is Salem’s interest in the other end of the spectrum that sets this book apart, that resets and yanks a mind into a new approach to processing this cultural moment.

A taste of this distance, this detachment and negation of outrage, comes in “Prop Comedian,” which lists performance pieces, including “the hairy, upside-down Austrians of Gelitin / sticking lit candles / in their assholes.” This is to God, the speaker observes,

the same as
the Israeli soldier parading around
in the red lingerie he found
in a bombed house in Gaza.

To God, the New Nakba is
a watermelon smashed with a sledgehammer
in Her schlocky comedy act.

The mistake might be to discount this as crude levity or feckless deflation and to miss the opportunity to be liberated, if momentarily, by the perspective that defangs evil by recognizing, accurately, its utter ridiculousness in the grand scheme. In “The Flea,” this is pushed to its extreme: “The whole world’s empty. / It doesn’t matter / what we do to each other.” If there’s an entity who thinks its violence very important, who feels it has purpose and moral weight, that preciousness—along with other pieties—cannot make it through this book unscathed.

Recently, while looking into the history of perspective in visual art, I learned that the concept of zero made its way from the Arab world into Western consciousness at the same time Renaissance art was formulating the vanishing point. This was a confluence of thought rather than a coincidence, as the German scholar Hans Belting explains: “[T]he viewer of a painting experiences himself precisely in the place where he is not present because the picture leaves a space for him, a place that is at the same time empty—a gap.” Quoting sociologist Dirk Baecker, he goes on: “Zero is written on the viewer’s body, since only where there is nothing, but something could be, does he himself stand.” In a much more minor confluence, I was reading Monk Fruit, noting the self-absences, the flickerings, like a faulty neon sign, between all and nothing. “L’Orgine du Monde” opens with the world’s origin yoked to the self’s beginning:

Surprise myself every time I begin
a new poem without Palestine,

though nothing is my other obsession […]

Palestine becomes

Israel. Israel becomes nothing.
Everything comes full circle.

Nothing is what’s inside the circle.

With the first line, the reader is called upon to fill the gap, to populate the subject (perhaps without realizing) before the sentence sutures the everything of Palestine tight to the nothing. In this close space of nullifying opposites, one might feel some psychic discomfort at the dissolution of weight. Not a Vedantist or Zen practitioner, I found myself needing new doors for these poems to arrive into my conscience’s landscape in order to understand how suffering might lose enough ground to make room for a new thought. The profound and ultimately tender work of this book is in its vision of what it takes to gain that potential. The gaze Belting describes, which positions the self as zero, as open to possibility and to arrival, felt intimately acquainted with the “I” in Monk Fruit, which respawns with each poem in a new position or voice, and which, with broad, blunt strokes, makes a clearing in the mind’s petrified forest.