In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Winner of 2024 Sarabande Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, Edward Salem’s collection Intifadas explores Palestinian identity with exceptional warmth and clarity. Necessary reading for modern times.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“These voice-driven narrative poems from Palestinian American artist Salem center on personal, political, and artistic acts of resistance.”
In his own words, here is Edward Salem’s Book Notes music playlist for his poetry collection Intifadas:
Broadcast – Before We Begin
Broadcast will always and forever be my favorite band. Haha Sound and Tender Buttons were on super heavy rotation while I was writing Intifadas.
Stereolab – Lo Boob Oscillator
My poem “Stereolab” hinges on a moment of recognition brought on by a royal blue and yellow t-shirt of the French band’s early logo, a blobby, smirking, kind of Botero-esque evil Elvis type. Later, I learned that this character is called “Cliff,” a revolutionary cartoon figure from a Swiss political comic strip from 1970 called Der tödliche Finger, “The Deadly Finger.” In the sanitized version on my t-shirt he’s pointing his finger, but the original design had him pointing a gun at some imagined establishment figure.
In any case, my cousins in Palestine thought it was weird, along with the earring I was wearing at the time. I tried to get them into Stereolab by playing the infectiously catchy “Lo Boob Oscillator,”but they didn’t connect with it and its sprawling, indulgent organ freak-out outro. Nope, not for them. Practically plugged their ears.
When I last left Palestine, I tucked away a couple bags of clothes, fully intending to return in six months. But it’s been years, and I haven’t yet. If my family hasn’t thrown the bags out by now (not that I’d blame them), my Stereolab t-shirt is still in my father’s old house in our village, waiting for me.
Najwa Karam – Worod Al Dar
Good thing my cousins and I could always agree on Najwa Karam, the Lebanese pop legend. “Worod Al Dar” was our favorite. If Stereolab excels at long outros, it’s hard to top Karam’s extended a cappella intro here.
Charlemagne Palestine – Timbral Assault
Charlemagne Palestine’s Island Song (1976) is a short film referenced in my poem “James Dean.” Island Song is the kind of pithy, roughly executed piece I’m jealous of not having made back when I was making video art. It mainly consists of lo-fi footage from the artist’s POV circling the island on motorbike, maniacally duetting with the bike’s grating engine, interjecting “Gotta get outta here… Gotta get outta here…”
When I was in high school, my stepmother moved her organ into our living room, which had a floor made of 1960s Italian tile that had convinced my parents to buy the house. After school, I usually had about an hour or two before anyone else got home, and for the one year we had the organ before my sisters scared her off, I’d plop down on the bench and play as nonsensically and wildly as I could. Eventually, I’d reach a sort of flow state where improvised melodies would appear. I’d push the ideas as far as I could until, more often than not, the music frayed back into chaotic nonsense. It was a bit like making a sand mandala, the catharsis of creating and letting go, and it inadvertently taught me the pleasure of making art in solitude.
Anyway, Charlemagne Palestine’s “Timbral Assault” reminds me of my after-school ritual, even more than his forty-minute piece “TheeOorgannnissstheeGgreattesttt-SsynthesizerrrEverrrrrrrr.”
My father opted for early retirement from his factory job at Chrysler—less pension, more freedom. The bulk of his time in retirement was spent on music—playing it, studying it, dancing to it (he would very adorably practice his moves for the tango, fox trot, even the hustle in our living room before going out to dances at Parents Without Partners), and blasting it through the house, family and neighbors be damned. He paid for a satellite dish that fetched dozens of Arabic language channels, and in between shamelessly watching sexed-up Lebanese music videos and Cinemax softcore with the windows open, he’d play vintage Oum Kalthoum orchestra concerts, alongside performances by Abdel Halim Hafez, Abdel Wahab, Farid al-Atrash. I get into this a bit in my poem “Fiona Apple Oum Kalthoum.”
Fiona Apple – Paper Bag
I am such a huge fan of Fiona Apple, not just as a musician, but also her love of rescue pitbulls and her volunteer work as a court-watcher, monitoring bail hearings online. I also relate to her reclusiveness. During a difficult time, which I allude to in the back-half of the poem “Won’t Visit,” I played Apple’s song “Paper Bag” every time I got in my car—I was out of town for a couple months and hadn’t brought my CD case, and When the Pawn… was in the CD player but most of the songs on the scratched-up CD skipped. Not “Paper Bag” though, and thank God, because I love its cabaret vibe and the way the lush horns build to a sublime final minute.
Ritchie Valens – La Bamba
Watching the film La Bamba is one of the first times I remember fighting back tears in front of my family. As I remember it, my sister and dad and I were watching it on our wood-encased Zenith box TV. Esai Morales’s performance as Bob, the rough, jealous older brother of 17-year-old musician Ritchie Valens, left a huge impression. It’s magnificently raw and uninhibited, struck through with bitterness and grief. In one scene, a drunk, emotional confrontation about the parental neglect he experienced compared to his brother, Morales makes the most affecting sound, a sort of primal honk-cry that, even with my child’s brain, felt like it came from a deep well of grief. I had so much anger at Buddy Holly for convincing Ritchie Valens to get on the plane that would kill them both that snowy night in Mason City, Iowa. That anger inflects my poem “Little Jew,” where I compare my father in old photographs from Kuwait in the 60s to Buddy Holly, “young and svelte, dark-rimmed glasses, / gelled, wavy black hair”—the antithesis of Bob.
Giorgio Moroder – Tony’s Theme (Scarface Soundtrack)
Another shirt as a way into memory—the speaker of my poem “Al Pacino,” originally titled “Scarface,” spots a man waiting for a bus in a Scarface hoodie with a print of Tony Montana in a Hawaiian shirt. This makes him think of a boy he met in Gaza many years earlier with a large scar on his face. I was speaking to the way that otherwise fun or ordinary things, like a famous gangster film from my childhood, are tainted with associations of what the world is letting Israel get away with in Palestine. Scarface couldn’t be more fun, between Pacino chewing the scenery, Michelle Pfeiffer watching a multi-screen TV from an opulent hot tub, both of them snorting mountains of coke, and the convergence of Oliver Stone’s script, Brian DePalma’s directing and Giorgio Moroder’s synth-heavy score seared in my mind as an essential element of the film’s identity—which just goes to show how nothing will ever be the same after the genocide in Gaza, how so many unexpected things remind you of the horrors carried out with impunity.
Death Grips – Black Paint
I read that Daniel Day-Lewis would listen to Eminem’s “The Way I Am” every day on the set of Gangs of New York to get amped up for his role as Bill the Butcher, which I find almost unbearably cute in a boomer dad kind of way. In my poem “Bust of a Pugilist,” an artist cycles through various street intervention artworks, eventually working up the nerve to pour black paint on a park boasting a decommissioned fighter jet and tank. If I were to do such a thing, “Black Paint” by Death Grips is what I’d listen to just before.
James Holden & The Animal Spirits – Go Gladly into the Earth
Second only to Broadcast, James Holden has made the most important music of my life. The Inheritors and The Animal Spirits are constant companions.
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.