Edward Salem’s Monk Fruit is always bringing up bugs. “I lord over bugs. I trap a fly in a jar / of crushed tomatoes,” Salem writes in the book’s last poem, “Final Montage,” and in the first:
four men walking toward the border
were vaporized by a drone
that hovered haltingly
like a buzzing bumblebee
before the stigma of a flower.
Between the alliterative bee of “Elsewhere” and patron lord of flies in “Final Montage,” across the mundanity and rich figurative motion of these insects, one finds the obsession of Monk Fruit: the quotidian sprawl of a life during a long period of political upheaval. First, some other bugs: “a fruit fly / the color of the brown glass / of the beer bottle it’s perched on,” (“Monasticism”), “a bee landed in my orange juice / and swam desperately in circles around the glass, trying to free itself” (“Buddha’s Bad Meal”), “Like flies rubbing / their hands back and forth (“Pynchon”), and “Babies won’t / resemble babies so much / as the wings of flies” (“Infinity is Just Another Place”). It almost seems out-of-place to point out the echo of Eliot in that last example—“And bats with baby faces in the violet light,” from “The Waste Land”—because the poems of Monk Fruit resist, in diction and attention, the impulse for a high lyricism. The book softens its own far-reaching intelligence with idiosyncratic obsessions, the cultural (pop and otherwise) ornaments of the everyday. These poems are fine-tuned to the cadence of speech, wandering through trifles and insects while, in the background and on the screens of our phones, mass destruction recurs.
Yet my own imprecisions here, “upheavals” and “destruction,” generalize how Monk Fruit enacts a changing politics over time. The poems think about the ongoing genocide committed against the Palestinian people, but they also brief our context with an American liberalism that has led to the mannered idiom in which this news can or cannot be addressed. Listen to these lines from “Told You Obama Wouldn’t Close Guantánamo”:
I’m the son of a factory worker
who was the son of a farmer
but they made me drink
blood. I don’t know whose.
They cut a Star of David
into my forehead
with a boxcutter.
My blood filled my eyes.
The salt of it stung.
It is the rhetorical turning of “but” that makes the visceral image exceed the spectacle of commentary suggested by the title. Figurative evidence is still evidence of a life, and these are poems, after all, led by sound, intuition, and discovery before discursivity. It’s not the point but the impression of a point, the metaphor that becomes our own visceral knowledge—as another poem imagines execution via bungee cord attached to construction crane: “…it’d be misinterpreted / as posthumous protest art—it should be shown / statistically that protest art is largely ineffective.” These lines appear in the poem “Aaron Bushnell Malachi Ritscher Mouhamed Bouazizi,” three figures who self-immolated to protest, respectively, the genocide in Palestine, the invasion of Iraq, and the Tunisian government pre-Arab Spring; to make the cartoon levity of the bungee cord cohere with the political urgency of immolation, one must understand the lines on “protest art” as distrusting their own observation. The shift in diction to scholarly precision—“it should be shown”—belies a resentment towards ostensibly occasional poetry in which a particular invocation is mandated, or as Salem writes in “L’Origine du Monde”: “Surprise myself every time I begin / a new poem without Palestine, // though nothing is my other obsession.”
Monk Fruit immediately, generatively exhausts itself with spiky questions of the social function of poetry. Where the idiom of response fails, a centered nothingness resists outright nihilism. “Nothing is my other obsession” because the conditions for nothing are always present, and if you’re doing nothing right, those conditions will not change:
The action I’m asking
you to take
in this poem is…
you decide.
It’s easy, reading this “Ode to ___________________ ___________________,” to feel these lines as ambiguously dismissive; it’s precisely because that reading feels intuitive the poem stuns readers beyond ambiguity. “You decide” is not a declaration of evasion but a refusal to participate in a moralistic call to action. These commands, though, come at the end; the poem more precisely begins with the embarrassing imperative “Take off your pants as you read this, / push them down to your ankles.” No, we will not do that (I assume), but the poem has made us admit this refusal. “Open Instagram, close Instagram,” the poem continues its command, then asks: “What are the odds you would’ve seen / slain Palestinians with your pants down / if you kept Instagram open?” You are more vulnerable, the poem suggests in its grammatical shift, yet more desensitized to your own vulnerability.
Another word for desensitized, in this case, could be vanity. In the scroll of GoFundMes “Sometimes / a famous poet will give $500 and leave / their name up,” as “Dabls” reminds us. Into posterity survive no poems but an endless list of donations: “The Dead Sea Scrolls / of the future could be screenshots / of a poet’s donations.” The realization of survival in an aftermath requires some degree of mundanity—but we’re not in an aftermath (itself a novelizing term), so instead the poems isolate the spectacle of violence against the spectacle of response. The Dead Sea Scrolls could be evidence of poets’ vanity, “or Gazan faces / or bejeweled, mirrored mosaics / falling from rotten cladding.” To shift from the withering reflection on poets (and their language) to the artifact of “mirrored mosaics” perhaps invites readers to see the image itself as moralizing; perhaps one especially feels the word “rotten” as a punitive point of commentary. Here again the book effectively situates its ambivalence (which, to be clear, is not outright resistance to moralism): the image of “mirrored mosaics / falling from rotten cladding” is pure image, and before one makes deductions, we must first feel this as a revelation. In other words, Monk Fruit anticipates our shortcomings—if not outright failures—which then become functional for the poems. Listen to the first two stanzas of “Go Left”:
The trees in my poems are not
the trees in Richard Powers’s novel.
Maybe that doesn’t mean anything to you.
I haven’t even finished his book.
You’re probably thinking my trees
are powerless victims. I’m Palestinian
after all. How can I compete with
Richard Powers’s knowing, wondrous trees
plus your biases?
“You’re probably thinking,” of course, is a way to make readers engage with that thought; I too have not finished The Overstory. “Maybe that doesn’t mean anything to you,” so how does one compete with the extant frameworks, legitimized by cultural institutions and reinforced by biases? There are places to look for answers: “Months ago, I unfurled the wrapper / of a Dove chocolate that read, When life / isn’t going right, go left.” Salem’s great talent here—and one pleasure of reading this book—is allowing the hokey American idiom to splinter, naturally leaping to what feels like an inevitable realization:
Richard Powers says the trees whisper
to each other; they cry out
in danger and pain.
Why is it beautiful
that more suffering
has been added to this world?
Just as much as the final question is a challenge, one must also understand it as genuine interrogation: asking the question in the first place becomes a kind of answer.
So a flea lands on a sweater; a man tries to smush the bug but, instead of killing it, pushes its body deeper into the fabric, finally expressing in “The Flea,” “The whole world’s empty. / It doesn’t matter / what we do to each other.” If this is John Donne’s flea, eros begets the visceral knowledge of suffering: it’s not the world’s empty so it doesn’t matter, rather emptiness usefully frames the interiority of “what we do to each other.” Between psychedelics and Curb Your Enthusiasm, Riz Ahmed and more than one therapist, the noise of jargon untethers Monk Fruit into this ecstatic nothingness; poetry, this book makes us feel, is not specially equipped with a sharp edge to sever that noise from the lasting effects of suffering—at least any more than other parts of a life. Rather than lessening the impact of a poem (as tends to be the defensive assumption), this relationship to poetry refuses generalization in a time of great formal diversity in American letters: what a poem accomplishes is determined by those sentences and lines, not the literary culture in which writers attach their names to GoFundMe donations. The first stanza of Monk Fruit reads, “I laughed at the phrase you used, / Emptied yourself. I thought, / It’s true, there’s nothing left.” The familiar vernacular transforms into a deeper knowledge: not expressible but embedded in form, enacted in the habits of daily life. Is this not the entire thing?
Christian Wessels
Christian Wessels is a poet, essayist, and critic. He is the author of Who Follow the Gleam (University of Massachusetts Press, April 2026), winner of the 2025 Juniper Prize in Poetry. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Rochester, from which he received his PhD in English. He splits his time between New York and the Black Forest, Germany, and is a Contributing Writer at Cleveland Review of Books.