How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave

by Maya Salameh

Winner, 2022 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize
“We need a new poetry lexicon—a new way of moleculing the poem on the page, even—and Maya Salameh brings it. We need all the strange Arabic-diasporic ways we can find for being in this terrible and joyful and often frighteningly banalizing world, and Salameh’s poems are a generous find. 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, from the Foreword The divine and the digital achieve a distinct corporality in Maya Salameh’s HOW TO MAKE AN ALGORITHM IN THE MICROWAVE , winner of the 2022 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. Layering prayer with code, Salameh brings supposedly unassailable technological constructs like algorithm, recursion, and loop into conversation with the technologies of womanhood, whether liner, lipstick, or blood. Exploring the relationships we have with our devices, she speaks back to the algorithm (“a computer’s admission to blood”), which acts simultaneously as warden, confidant, and data thief. Here Salameh boldly examines how an Arab woman survives the digitization of her body—experimenting with form to create an intimate collage of personal and neocolonial histories, fearlessly insinuating herself into the scripts that would otherwise erase her, and giving voice to the full mess of ritual.

Genres: Poetry

106 pages, Paperback

Published October 14, 2022

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 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, and the chapbook rooh (Paper Nautilus Press, 2020). She has received 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, and served as a National Student Poet, America’s highest honor for youth poets. Her work has appeared in The Offing, Poetry, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, AGNI, Mizna, and the LA Times, among others. She can be found @mayaslmh or mayasalameh.com.

Reviews

[Crystal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excerpts:

I am still learning to find
rooms to be alone in.

(from “SCRIPTURE IS GOSSIP”)

I want
the hunger God born me with.

(from “FAIROUZ RECITES HER LUNGS”)

this city is full of my blood. I go outside
rip the grass

stand up with my palms full of soil & rosary
bruised rosary
blooming rosary

maybe I just need to smoke more & stretch & eat frivolous things &
anyway
I’m working on it

(from “JUNE JORDAN SAYS MAYBE I NEED A WOMAN MAYBE I NEED A MAN”)

[Cheryl · Rating 2 out of 5]

One to watch, a poet wielding words and a voice of consequence.

THE PRAYER OF THE BODY IS ATTENTION
I am the living proof green melon apricots skin luminous with fever no tragedies today I admire the span of my ass in the mirror conjure melancholy from me with daisy clips here are both my breasts & my legs
I don't trust my body preceded me by six centuries at least I am the living proof incense blooming my sternum.

CASTHTML
APARTMENT: a body with stairs; noun: the faucets moon. the asbestos moans.
ALGORITHM: is a sacred object. it summarizes.
LOOP: not a very good daughter. she takes long walks to think about nothing, moths. nasty habit of refraction. met her in San Francisco on a book tour.
VENUS: the sister.
ALEPPO: the cousin.
ALGORITHM: threads pulled out of a computer. bits can be found in the veins. like no more watching.
BOOLEAN: numerology, i.e., a code & a homily are both instructions.
DAMASCUS: jasmine (apartment) (playground) (store)
ALGORITHM: a computer's admission to blood. this makes the screen just as fallible & possibly anemic.
MARS: visits occasionally, leaves his shoes on in my room.
SAN DIEGO: America's Finest City.
VENUS: see in the neighborhood of page 59. likes her eyeliner navy & underneath like it's 2006.
AMY: famed British pop singer. miracle with nicked ankles.

LOGARITHM 14
recursion (emulsion, gears, teeth} recursion {bint}
recursion {I was a boy growing up}
new algorithm _with crinkles around it that demonstrate the age to which I survived: I'm still
lipsticked somewhere_inebriating the room. there's
Venus remnants in my ears
& my throat is full. I
gesture like the Colorado_ Iam old enough to be conscripted.
bint: between my ribs it smells
like cigarettes & cracked oranges. \ recursion (there's \
no difference between musicians & women.) \
I am one fifty three pounds [five foot eight]. bint: I am a growing
[boy who forgets to eat]. I'm wearing my getcatcalledjeans, cracked algorithm. Europa,
Io, Metis: my gender, Callisto:
recursion: teeth, emulsion, girlgearsmoon.

PUNNET WITH AMY

like dime store gold, I pile on a couch for algorhythm: Amy makes a pattern with the holiday & shine like rust. I am six, the her throat. the screen stutters. music is a television is blaring. her hair a beehive, technology: I serenade the headline from crosses piled on her neck. she scats her my marrow. her voice iridescent / my indigo stomach, Marlboros, staccato

Amy opens her mouth with a country in it, croons my ribs open. fhemt? my dress blossoms loudly & it is Boston. bint her testament, my tattered breasts. fhemt?
words are a business. we bleed glottal for the audience. we confess elegant, without confessing.

there is the photo of her in an insincere smile. dad liked to say we were descended from royalty. he was lying but I walked like I believed him. the screen cracks. we pour in jasmine rain oranges. we peer back. I have a brittle conviction I will make a beautiful woman.

[Caitlin Conlon · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s always a good feeling, when you’re reading a poetry collection and learning something new about form on every page. Maya Salameh has created something wholly unique & wholly hers, & I can’t wait to see what she does next.

[Summer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maya Salameh I love your brain. The range these poems have! The playfulness, the depth of emotion, yalla what a star

[Tara Mukund · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maya weaves together prayer and technology, music and thought in the most MAGICAL ways. I love everything she writes and the parts of HTMAAITM I have read might just be my favorite yet.

[Joey Reisberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the many impressive aspects of Maya Salameh’s debut is the formal experimentation. And what a range of forms! From Punnett Squares to photographs to computer codes to the letter ن, these poems are too daring to be contained by traditional stanzas. But I also love how Salameh brings warmth and tenderness to what is often thought of as unfeeling algorithms and technological language. The poems are similarly wide-ranging in their scope. In addition to the recurring figures of Fairouz and Amy Winehouse, the poems bounce back and forth between themes including family history and memory, religion, coming of age and sexuality. Rather than the more familiar torn-between-two-worlds narrative, the speakers in Salameh’s poems exuberantly collapse borders between time and space to make vivid, polyvocal poems. For example, I loved the playfulness of including lines like “did roomie buy you the Fireball?” within a poem that draws its title and theology from a medieval astronomer. (I think I read this poem fifty times, I couldn’t stop returning to it.) I was also inspired by the poem “Sleep Apnea with City Block,” which uses the area codes of San Diego and Lebanon as a kind of incantation. The poem whirls us between these places until they meld into one very personal memoryscape for the speaker. This is the kind of book to return to again and again.

[Emma Reilly · Rating 5 out of 5]

amy winehouse they could never make me hate u

[Hanna Yost · Rating 3 out of 5]

Entirely different. Hard to digest. Some stunning, brilliant parts. I feel like at least half of this went over my head the first time around. Will revisit again at a later time.

[Jack Malik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Avant-garde. As always, Etel Adnan Poetry Series doesn’t disappoint. However, it wasn’t as enjoyable as Zaina Alsous’ “Theory of Birds.” Really heavy on form and style.