Mermaid Theory: Poems

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. This daring collection deploys psychological evaluation forms, ritual incantations, and captivating visual poetry.

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. Salameh scrutinizes established academic and cultural narratives, inviting readers to rethink their own understandings of history and identity.

REVIEWS

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, author of GIRLS THAT NEVER DIE and The January Children

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, author of Terrorist Assemblages and The Right to Maim

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. At times sexy and lush as a Prince song, at other times singing in the righteous harmonies of necessary revolutions, Mermaid Theory breathes the wonder of myth into the poet’s witnessing of the worlds around her and 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. And everywhere here there is love, so much love that the poet must confess “of all/ my prayers you are my favorite.” So much love humming off these pages that “this song/ lasts longer than the mountains & all the horses nearby can smell it.” A truly fantastic collection that begs to be savored over and over.
- Danez Smith, author of Homie and Don’t Call Us Dead

What I enjoy about Maya Salameh's poems in Mermaid Theory is the surprise. Every sentence in these poems is an opportunity to see something differently, to astonish. Just a few examples: "in the house we speak 3 languages but grooming's the first," "I'll transcribe myself/to bricks," or "it's November now/& the noun under the sink is screaming again." Formally inventive, imagistically surprising, and intellectually capacious and nuanced, Mermaid Theory skillfully explores mythology, Arab American identity and womanhood, faith, and so much more.
- Victoria Chang, author of OBIT and With My Back to the World

Formally daring and politically incisive, Mermaid Theory reckons with water as history, as present, as divinity, as desire, as fear, as at once “a vast archive” and “an immense grave.” Refusing cultural amnesia and feel-good liberal sentimentality, these poems read “the dead’s grammar” and praise a “ravenous love for life.” This is a poet who’s not waiting around for the imperialist death machine to declare who counts as a person or what counts as art. 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, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

Maya Salameh is an intelligent, daring poet sculpting her art between the irreverent and the experimental. Mermaid Theory propels the imaginary toward movement. This is cinema in verse.
- Fady Joudah, author of […] and Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance

Maya Salameh’s Mermaid Theory is a precise and intimate book about girlhood, the body, and what it means to grow up in a world that is neither kind nor forgiving. These poems move between memory, inheritance, and the daily negotiations of becoming, holding tenderness and harm in the same frame. Salameh writes with clarity about girlhood as both a site of imagination and constraint, where myth, family, and history quietly shape the self. I love this book and am dazzled by its sharpness, its humor, and its depth.
- Noor Hindi, author of DEAR GOD. DEAR BONES. DEAR YELLOW.