Maya Salameh’s collection How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave, winner of the 2022 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, has been reviewed in Poetry.
In How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave, Maya Salameh draws on the language of computer programming to craft poems that contemplate gender-based violence, Amy Winehouse, the Arab diaspora, and the trials of faith and family and womanhood. The opening poem, “CAST.HTML,” (dis)orients with its unconventional definitions: “TRANSLATION: the alphabet’s revenge on the body.” … The astonishingly inventive forms in How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave stretch our capacity as readers while exploring the shimmering potential of images and verbs: “& if hail appears my language might daughter itself into wheat.”
—Layla Benitez-James, Poetry, October 2022
The divine and the digital achieve a distinct corporality in Maya Salameh’s How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave. 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.
Maya Salameh is a poet fellow of the William Male Foundation and a former National Student Poet, America’s highest honor for youth poets. Salameh currently serves as community organizer for Stanford University’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts. She is the author of the chapbook rooh, and her poems have appeared in Poetry magazine, The Rumpus, ANMLY, and Mizna, among other publications.
The Poetry Foundation recognizes the power of words to transform lives. We work to amplify poetry and celebrate poets by fostering spaces for all to create, experience, and share poetry. Established in 2003 upon receipt of a major gift from philanthropist Ruth Lilly, the Poetry Foundation evolved from the Modern Poetry Association, which was founded in 1941 to support the publication of Poetry magazine. The gift from Ruth Lilly allowed the Poetry Foundation to expand and enhance the presence of poetry in the United States and established an endowment that will fund Poetry in perpetuity.