Forest of Noise
‘Powerful, capacious and profound’ OCEAN VUONG
‘A book you won’t soonforget’ ILYA KAMINSKY
‘Astonishing’ TERRANCE HAYES
A deeply powerful debut collection of poems about life in Gaza by an award-winning Palestinian poet.
Barely thirty years old, Mosab Abu Toha was already a well-known poet when the current siege of Gaza began. After the Israeli army bombed and destroyed his house, pulverizing a library he had painstakingly built for community use, he and his family fled for their safety. Not for the first time in their lives.
Somehow, amid the chaos, Abu Toha kept writing poems. These are those poems. Uncannily clear, direct, and beautifully tuned, they form one of the most astonishing works of art wrested from wartime. Here are directives for what to do in an air raid; here are lyrics about the poet’s wife, singing to his children to distract them. Huddled in the dark, Abu Toha remembers his grandfather’s oranges, his daughter’s joy in eating them.
Moving between glimpses of life in relative peacetime and absurdist poems about surviving in a barely liveable occupation, Forest of Noise invites a wide audience into an experience that defies the imagination—even as it is watched live. Abu Toha’s poems introduce readers to his extended family, some of them no longer with us. This is an urgent, extraordinary, and searingly beautiful book, it brings us indelible art in a time of terrible suffering.
‘Necessary, and wrought out of both terror and truth, these poems sing and weep in a rough and haunting harmony’ ADA LIMÓN, author of The Hurting Kind
‘Astonishing … His elemental poems dissolve the empty rhetoric and posturing with simple, striking truth’ NAOMI SHIHAB NYE, author of The Tiny Journalist
”'A powerful, capacious, and profound book, rich in intelligence and lyric dexterity that fuses poetry's two great promises, wonder and testament, into crystalline focus” - Ocean Vuong, author of Time Is a Mother
”'The poems in Mosab Abu Toha's Forest of Noise are urgent, prayerful howls in the bleakest of nights. Necessary, and wrought out of both terror and truth, these poems sing and weep in a rough and haunting harmony. Abu Toha's work begs the reader to pay close attention as each poetic line is, at its heart, a lifeline to survival” - Ada Limón, US Poet Laureate, author of The Hurting Kind
”'His poems resonate with undeniable immediacy upon a first reading and continue ringing more and more urgently with every subsequent reading. Abu Toha writes with a brilliance that makes anyone who encounters these astonishing poems both witness and kin” - Terrance Hayes, author of So to Speak
”'Heartbreaking, evocative, transformative poetry of witness to the horror of warfare. It happens in real time, as we turn pages. This is powerful, impactful poetry, a book you won’t soon forget” - llya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic
‘In Forest of Noise, his astonishing second book, Mosab Abu Toha is the essential poet embodying the humanity of Gaza, the precious hopes and dreams of all humans, the searing collective cries of children, the indelible honest conscience, the heart and soul' Naomi Shihab Nye, author of The Tiny Journalist -