How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave

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.”

While Salameh’s tone is often playful, dreamy, or detached, her subject matter is anything but, and speakers are often teetering at the edge of a surreal world: “the house shrinks to the fabric across my breasts & / haven’t I been good? crossed my legs for the priests & capitalists?” 

Part of what makes the book’s programing framework so effective is the poet’s experimentation with verbs, which calls our attention to the way words operate on our minds as bits of code that we, in turn, process. In “Blood Work,” the speaker claims:

[…] I search my tooth fillings 
for diamonds I forge the sun’s signature on 
her visa papers Beirut him in the back of the head 
he writes hacer hacer hacer in its six iterations 

In “Memory Is a Software,” comprised of what appears to be a list of functions formatted in a table, “func(sacrament)” corresponds with “the priest wrings the solar system from my mouth.” In “Cadillac Algorithm,” a speaker observes: “you atone your hair above the sink,” and in “How to Fix an Elevator in Trabulsi,” the elevator remains broken, and the speaker is left to “gorge / flights of gray /stairs.”

For Salameh, a poem is not, as William Carlos Williams suggested, a “machine made of words,” but a program meant to be processed by poem-reading machines, that is, humans. “[A] code & a homily are both instructions,” writes Salameh, and her poems enfold abstract concepts within the measured language of mathematics and technology: “desire / is a logic;; there’s a corner of my womb in someone’s browser history.” 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.”