Maya Salameh thinks you should be reading more work in translation.
an interview with poet, educator, performer, & researcher, Maya Salameh
A few years ago, I read Maya Salameh’s debut poetry collection How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave and was incredibly impressed by it. She played with form in such unique ways, without ever sacrificing the content of her work. I’d never read a poetry collection like it before, and I haven’t read anything like it since. Maya and I have since connected on social media, and when I began envisioning this interview series she was one of the first people I thought of. Not only is she talented and kind, but she’s also, for lack of a better term, cool as hell.
When I reached out to her, Maya told me that her sophomore collection—Mermaid Theory—was being released on April 7th of this year, which corresponded really nicely with this late-March interview I pitched. Maya and Haymarket Books were nice enough to send me an advanced copy of Mermaid Theory, which I loved so much that, in addition to my standard survey, I put together a series of specific questions I had about the book. I couldn’t help it!
I’m so excited to share this interview with Maya. Let’s get into it!!
Maya Salameh is the author of Mermaid Theory (Haymarket Books, 2026) and How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave (University of Arkansas Press, 2022), winner of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. Salameh is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, the Sewanee Review Poetry Prize, and the Markowitz Award for Exceptional New Writers. Her work has appeared in The Offing, Poetry, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, AGNI, Mizna, and the LA Times. She can be found @mayaslmh or mayasalameh.com
Dancing Through The Margins…with Maya Salameh
Was there a certain book or author that ignited your love for literature when you were young?
Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet was the first book I remember really staying with me. My dad lent it to me when I was about thirteen, and something about the way Gibran assembled language felt so true & straight to the marrow. In my favorite piece from the collection, “On Joy and Sorrow,” Gibran tells us, “The deeper sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” I’ve always felt deeply (almost unbearably so at times), as I think most poets do, and that passage made me feel seen in some way, or gave me a more helpful framework for that capacity.
CGC: I keep telling myself I need to read Khalil Gibran because so many poets I admire talk so highly of his work. This feels like a sign to move him up my list!
How does reading fit into your current life?
In this era of my life, reading for pleasure happens mostly in fragments. As a law student, most of my daylight hours are already saturated with text, to the degree that by the time I get home, it’s tempting to turn my brain off and just watch Love Island (yes, I know it’s a psyop). And sometimes I do. But every night before I sleep, I read for at least twenty minutes, even if it’s only a few pages. I read on the bus to school and between obligations. It’s an odds-and-ends practice right now but it keeps me tethered to my artistic self.
Can you describe your reading taste in ten words or less?
Electric, lyrical prose that takes you by the neck.
Is there a certain book that you think everyone should read?
I’ve been reading more novels lately, and I find myself returning often to Sarah Cypher’s The Skin and Its Girl and Raven Leilani’s Luster. Both are so sharply observed and lyrically alive, and describe a kind of monstrous, visceral girlhood I think I tend to be drawn to in my own imagination and writing.
CGC: I read Luster a few years ago and thought Leilani’s prose was so rich, so delicious, so poetic. I second Maya’s recommendation here—especially if you’re looking for beautiful language in your novels!
Do you have any hot takes about reading or writing that you’d like to share?
My hot take is that I think at least a quarter of our reading lives should be spent with works in translation. We miss entire worlds when we read only English-language writers. Khaled Mattawa’s brilliant translations opened for me the work of Adonis, Nizar Qabbani, Maram al-Massri, and others whose lyricism and political imagination have deeply shaped my writing. I think reading beyond English expands not just what we know, but how we think.
CGC: I’ve made it a goal of mine to read more work in translation this year, after a pretty abysmal year of it in 2025. Thank you, Maya, for providing this jumping-off point :)
Where’s your favorite place to get books?
The UCLA library because it’s free :)
CGC: LOVE this answer. Use your local libraries!!! Keep them around!!!
What’s the last book you read that really impressed you?
Munira Khayyat’s A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon. It’s a theoretical and semi-autoethnographic meditation on how southern Lebanese communities resist imperial and Zionist occupations through political and community mobilization, as well as via their relationality to their land. Khayyat writes at one point that “war to me is an intimate object.” And so it is. The book weaves archival research, interviews, and lived experience with such care; it was an important work I found myself returning to as I thought through Mermaid Theory.
“From an award-winning, innovative poet, a bold reimagination of Arab American womanhood in the modern military age.
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.”
What do you feel is the main difference between Mermaid Theory and your first collection, How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave?
My first collection, How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave, is preoccupied with surveillance: how these technologies are piloted on Arabs abroad and then redeployed against marginalized communities in the U.S. It moves between macro-politics and the recursive spectacle of Arab death. Mermaid Theory is more ecological; it thinks through memory via water, via the myth of the mermaid, via the Mediterranean as both cradle and grave. The book still contends with death and grief, especially the sea as a site of exile and drowning, but it also tries to more specifically interrogate my own positionality. In this book, I try to ask harder questions about what it means to witness from the privilege of an American passport. What are my responsibilities? How do I move beyond consumption, and beyond aestheticizing grief, and toward some form of accountability? Both books are romantic and obsessive, but I think Mermaid Theory tries to be a bit more self-implicating.
Something I admire about your work is how often you experiment with non-traditional and invented forms. Do you find that when you envision a new poem—before ever beginning to write—you can already see what form it’ll take on the page, or is that something that comes later?
Not usually. I tend to write in fragments; lines come to me while I’m walking or teaching or in class. I text them to myself or add them to a big eighty-page google doc I call my Frankenstein file. Once a week or so, I sit with that document and see whether the shards want to become a body. My instinct is often to begin in a prose block, which probably derives from the breathless syntax of the spoken word scene I came up in. But once the prose exists, I ask whether that form feels true to the emotional core—usually it doesn’t. Sometimes it needs to be blown apart. That’s when I experiment with erasure, concrete forms, borders, tables, or some new visual constraint. For me, the form emerges through revision and is less premeditated than discovered.
CGC: Someone should conduct a study on the “spoken word poet eventually experiments with invented poetic forms pipeline.” I know a number of poets that started as spoken word poets & are now going above & beyond with formatting choices.
I was very moved by how intentionally you placed poems about girlhood and friendship alongside poems about trauma, being Arab-American in our current political climate, and pieces that replicate the look of medical intake forms. How do you balance writing about joy and grief in close proximity?
I don’t think I balance them so much as I live inside their collision. There’s a discomfort in writing joy beside catastrophe, especially as an Arab subject who also holds U.S. citizenship. I struggle with neoliberal messaging of “joy as resistance,” which feel to me flattened or overly self-indulgent. At the same time, I don’t believe poetry is useless. Poetry doesn’t feed people, but it helps keep people alive. It has saved lives, has saved my life. My life is full of these emotional whiplashes, especially of intimate happinesses beside relational devastations. The poems replicate that dissonance and sit joy next to grief because that is the honest texture of my interior life. It’s meant to be a bit disorienting—as Edward Said tells us, “With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and ‘out of place.’”
CGC: As someone who’s struggled to articulate why poetry feels so essential right now despite being somewhat “useless” in solving real-world problems, Maya captures my feelings really well here.
One of my favorite poems in Mermaid Theory is “Haggling the Shami Way.” Taking place in both Syria and America, this prose poem is long, detailed, and wide-ranging. What was the initial spark that ignited this piece, and did you always intend for it to be as long as it is?
“Haggling the Shami Way” began as a journal during my family’s trip to Syria. I put it away for nearly a year. When I returned to it, I realized there was a seed there, something about distance, or the performance of it. I didn’t initially intend for it to be as long as it is but as I kept returning to it, the sprawl felt necessary. The length mirrored the excess of memory, the romanticization of return, and eventually my critique of that romanticization. As it grew, it became less about nostalgia and more about interrogating my own longing.
Are there any particular books or authors that were helpful or inspiring for you as you wrote this collection?
Yes!! This book would not be possible without some north star inspirations, which I hope the work lives in cousinhood with: Sennah Yee’s How Do I Look?, the movie Atlantics, Banah el Ghadbanah’s La Syrena: Visions of a Syrian Mermaid from Space, Etel Adnan’s writing, but especially The Arab Apocalypse and Letters to Fawwaz, Munira Khayyat’s A Landscape of War, Ariana Benson’s Black Pastoral, Hala Alyan’s The Arsonist’s City, and Rochelle Jordan’s music, but especially her 4th album. If you’re curious, you can find the book playlist here.
CGC: Just finished my first Hala Alyan and can’t wait to read my next—maybe The Arsonist’s City will be it!
Maya, thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview. I found it so fascinating that you usually start writing poems in big blocks of text. I often struggle in my own work with trying to do too much at once in a first draft, and it’s really reassuring to hear that you can still be creative and rework things that begin as a paragraph. I also really appreciated your answer to the question of joy & grief living side by side, for reasons I articulated above, and your reading list for Mermaid Theory! As soon as I’m done typing up this interview, I’m immediately adding them to my personal reading list!!
If you’re a writer interested in taking a virtual workshop to learn from Maya, she’s doing one on Thursday, April 2nd, from 7 pm to 8:15 pm EST, called “Suppose The Law: Poems as Briefs, Pleadings, and Refusals.” In this 75-minute, all-levels workshop, you’ll read poets who write with, against, and around legal language, then draft new work that treats the page like a docket, writ, refusal—a protection order for the self and community. You’ll engage in a short Socratic discussion to unpack how the law names and erases harm, then move into two quick generative writes: 1) an erasure or redaction from a legal text and 2) a rights-based address, oath, or affidavit to someone we love. No legal training is required, only curiosity. You can sign up for this workshop here!
To follow along with everything else Maya is up to, you can follow her on Instagram and Twitter at @mayaslmh.
& don’t forget to preorder Maya’s new book, Mermaid Theory, which releases on April 7th. It is excellent!!! You won’t regret it!!!! :)
Have you read any of Maya’s book recs? Do you agree with me that she’s cool as hell? Leave a comment below! Let’s chat!!
Until next time,
Caitlin
LOVED this one, Caitlin!!! this series is so valuable (and I can’t wait to add more translated works to my tbr!)
thank you for sharing this interview with us — truly loved reading it. been meaning to read more works in translation and will need to start making a list!