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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.
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.
- GenresPoetry
72 pages, Hardcover
Published April 7, 2026
About the author
Maya Salameh
5 books4 followersMaya Salameh is the author of Mermaid Theory (Haymarket Books, 2026), 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.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 27, 2025
4.5 stars. Years after reading it, I still think of Maya Salameh’s ‘How To Make an Algorithm in The Microwave,’ which means I was really excited to dive into her sophomore collection.
This collection is even better than her debut. Salameh still plays with form in unique ways, and uses it to examine identity, belonging, girlhood, and love. I bookmarked a ton of these poems, and am already looking forward to reading them again. Get a copy of this one when it’s released!!
This collection is even better than her debut. Salameh still plays with form in unique ways, and uses it to examine identity, belonging, girlhood, and love. I bookmarked a ton of these poems, and am already looking forward to reading them again. Get a copy of this one when it’s released!!
Review of advance copy received from Author
“love is lifelong and I am made of every girl who lent me shoes.”
Thank you so much to the author for the gifted copy! This book will be published in the US by Haymarket Books on April 7th, 2026.
Some books feel like they’re asking you to witness them. Mermaid Theory feels like it’s asking you to hold it carefully, the way you would hold something alive.
Maya Salameh’s collection traces Arab American femininity through fragments of girlhood, myth, and memory. We move through college parties, cigarettes, press-on nails, and Carhartts, while something heavier sits just beneath the surface. The opening poem says that “war is the death of awe,” and this lingers as the poems shift between personal and political, between the intimacy of growing up and the pressure of being read through Islamophobia and femmephobia. The collection blends experimental forms with lyric intensity, from erasure poems that expose how Western psychiatry fails Arab American girls to pieces that read like ritual or testimony.
Atargatis, the Syrian fertility goddess and first mermaid, appears throughout as both anchor and escape. Myth offers a way to reimagine the self, but it also raises a quiet question about what it means to be safer as a symbol than as a woman. Water moves through the collection in the same way, returning again and again as body, memory, and inheritance. When Salameh writes about visiting Syria, about the altered scent of Damascus after Long COVID, about the weight of her mother’s history, the poems hold that sense of in-betweenness without trying to resolve it.
What stayed with me most is how much care lives in these pages. There is reverence for women, for friendship, for the small rituals that make survival possible. The writing itself is fluid and searching, moving between image, theory, and confession with a cadence that feels both controlled and on the verge of breaking. Some moments feel intentionally disjointed, but that fragmentation mirrors the tensions the book is holding.
This is a collection that understands identity as something shaped by history, violence, care, and choice all at once. It doesn’t simplify that complexity. It stays with it. I loved these poems and think you should read them if you haven’t already.
📖 Read this if you love: Lyrical and experimental poetry; hybrid forms that blur myth and theory; diaspora narratives that resist easy resolution; reflections on embodiment and survival under empire; the poems of Ocean Vuong.
🔑 Key Themes: Arab American Identity and In-Betweenness, Myth and Embodiment, Diaspora and Exile, Islamophobia and Femmephobia, War and Memory, Care and Community as Resistance, Language and Self-Construction.
Content / Trigger Warnings: War (minor), Alcohol (minor), Pandemic (minor), Stalking (minor), Misogyny (minor), Drug Use (minor).
Thank you so much to the author for the gifted copy! This book will be published in the US by Haymarket Books on April 7th, 2026.
Some books feel like they’re asking you to witness them. Mermaid Theory feels like it’s asking you to hold it carefully, the way you would hold something alive.
Maya Salameh’s collection traces Arab American femininity through fragments of girlhood, myth, and memory. We move through college parties, cigarettes, press-on nails, and Carhartts, while something heavier sits just beneath the surface. The opening poem says that “war is the death of awe,” and this lingers as the poems shift between personal and political, between the intimacy of growing up and the pressure of being read through Islamophobia and femmephobia. The collection blends experimental forms with lyric intensity, from erasure poems that expose how Western psychiatry fails Arab American girls to pieces that read like ritual or testimony.
Atargatis, the Syrian fertility goddess and first mermaid, appears throughout as both anchor and escape. Myth offers a way to reimagine the self, but it also raises a quiet question about what it means to be safer as a symbol than as a woman. Water moves through the collection in the same way, returning again and again as body, memory, and inheritance. When Salameh writes about visiting Syria, about the altered scent of Damascus after Long COVID, about the weight of her mother’s history, the poems hold that sense of in-betweenness without trying to resolve it.
What stayed with me most is how much care lives in these pages. There is reverence for women, for friendship, for the small rituals that make survival possible. The writing itself is fluid and searching, moving between image, theory, and confession with a cadence that feels both controlled and on the verge of breaking. Some moments feel intentionally disjointed, but that fragmentation mirrors the tensions the book is holding.
This is a collection that understands identity as something shaped by history, violence, care, and choice all at once. It doesn’t simplify that complexity. It stays with it. I loved these poems and think you should read them if you haven’t already.
📖 Read this if you love: Lyrical and experimental poetry; hybrid forms that blur myth and theory; diaspora narratives that resist easy resolution; reflections on embodiment and survival under empire; the poems of Ocean Vuong.
🔑 Key Themes: Arab American Identity and In-Betweenness, Myth and Embodiment, Diaspora and Exile, Islamophobia and Femmephobia, War and Memory, Care and Community as Resistance, Language and Self-Construction.
Content / Trigger Warnings: War (minor), Alcohol (minor), Pandemic (minor), Stalking (minor), Misogyny (minor), Drug Use (minor).
August 15, 2026
“we sing for weeks. we sing until the empire is over, until the moon runs out of neighbors, until the horizon ends its affair with verse. we sing until we make poetry, until we are the beauty prophets warn about.”
May 14, 2026
i grieve girlhood
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews