Intifadas - by Edward Salem (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Winner of 2024 Sarabande 2024 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the Top 10 Poetry collections for Spring 2026, featured in Literary Hub, excerpts featured in The Slowdown, The Believer and the American Academy of Poets magazine

A subversive collection about Palestinian resistance, liberation and art

Written across Palestine and its diaspora--from Gaza and the West Bank to the United States--Intifadas is a subtly transgressive poetry collection about uprising in its many forms--in art, politics, and in our most personal relationships. Whether by dumping black paint on a park where a tank and fighter jet commemorate a war, or by trying to rescue a moth trapped in a garage, the defiant and resilient voices in this collection subvert traditional narratives of loss. Furious, tender, and darkly funny, Intifadas asks what art can do in the face of catastrophe, and answers with poems that refuse easy consolations.

Review Quotes

PRAISE FOR INTIFADAS

"Absolutely essential reading during these uncertain times."
--Booklist, Starred Review

"These voice-driven narrative poems from Palestinian American artist Salem center on personal, political, and artistic acts of resistance."
--Publisher's Weekly, "Spring 2026 Fiction & Nonfiction Preview: Poetry Top 10"

"The questions he asks about exile and return, collective responsibility and art-making as a form of witness are not simple, but he asks them in ways that invite readers in."
--Bookpage

"In Intifadas Salem accomplishes the very difficult: to balance the scales of our human potentials, and at that, readers will marvel."
--Green Linden Press

"This is a book of poems steeped in tenderness and love for a place, for a people. [...] there is also a richness, a depth of humanity that shines through in the work, and the desire to uplift and protect that humanity might drive you to deep affection, which may flip the switch of rage, which may, I hope, flip the second switch of action."
--Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There's Always This Year

"Edward Salem is a perfect poet. He writes about everything including being Palestinian with an easy publicness, a ferociousness, a jadedness and a warmth--and he accomplishes the hardest part of a poem, the end, like a saint. His endings feel like asides in which everyone, if they want it, feels included."
--Eileen Myles, author of A "Working Life"

"If empire could become a witness to itself, it would look like Salem's work--a beautiful soul who has somehow managed to condense a tremendous amalgam of our collective history and culture without denying either part's intimacy or violence."
--Marwa Helal, author of Invasive species

"Salem has delivered an essential book, alternatingly infuriating and hilarious, a punk manifesto screaming into the void but also throwing stones into it."
--Danny Caine, author of Jewish American Dream

PRAISE FOR EDWARD SALEM

"Salem requires his readers to rethink how and why they come to (Palestinian-American) poetry in the first place, and what quiet cultural-political structures have a vested interest in Palestinian-American verse being either epiphanic or redemptive. [...] One leaves the collection excoriated, but as a result renewed and reattuned to suffering's many registers. We startle back into the worst timeline, this one, where our work lies."
--Noah Warren, Fence Digital

"Salem's writing rings with an honesty that I found intimately provocative yet subtle. . . It's also funny."
--Ottessa Moshfegh, in praise of "Sacrilege"

About the Author

Edward Salem is the author of Monk Fruit (Nightboat, 2025) and Intifadas (Sarabande, 2026), which was the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, selected by Hanif Abdurraqib, and a finalist for the National Poetry Series. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. His fiction can be found in Granta and BOMB. Born in Detroit to Palestinian parents, he was an artist throughout his thirties, working in performance, street interventions, and experimental film. His work has been exhibited at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah, The Hangar in Beirut, and many other venues. He currently resides in Detroit and is the founding co-director of City of Asylum/Detroit.