Don't be scared straight! Curl up on the couch with Joe and Gina for a romp through their favorite horror movies, TV shows, and books from the 1930s to today, exploring their messages, meaning, and enduring appeal for queer audiences. From The Thing to vampire porn, The Exorcist to paranormal television, Goblin Market to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, these thoughtful, conversational essays will make you think, laugh, shiver, and see your favorite media in a new light (even if you have to cover your eyes for the scary parts).  Horror buffs and queer media mavens alike will enjoy this wide ranging journey through a genre often derided, dismissed, and misunderstood, but which offers rich opportunities to explore our culture's ideas about gender, sexuality, and desire. Whether you relate to the monster or the final girl, enjoy sleuthing hidden queer themes, or just want recommendations for obscure, low-budget ghost movies, this book'll be a scream.

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.

A divorcee embarks on her “year of yes” and crosses paths with a shy but sensitive birdwatcher who changes her life in this charming rom-com that is perfect for fans of Christina Lauren and Ali Hazelwood. Newly divorced, almost-empty-nester Celeste is finally seeking adventure and putting herself first, cliches be damned. So when a friend asks Celeste to “partner” with his buddy John for an event, Celeste throws herself into the role of his temporary girlfriend. But quiet cinnamon roll John isn’t looking for love, just birds—he needs a partner for Tucson’s biggest bird-watching contest if he’s ever going to launch his own guiding business. By the time they untangle their crossed signals, they’ve become teammates…and thanks to his meddling friends, a fake couple. Celeste can’t tell a sparrow from a swallow, but John is a great teacher, and the hours they spend hiking in the Arizona wilderness feed Celeste’s hunger for new adventures while giving John a chance to practice his dream job. As the two spend more time together, they end up watching more than just the birds, and their chemistry becomes undeniable. Since they’re both committed to the single life, Celeste suggests a status upgrade: birders with benefits, just until the contest is done. But as the bird count goes up and their time together ticks down, John and Celeste will have to decide if their benefits can last a lifetime, or if this love affair is for the birds.