Forest of Noise: Unabridged edition
‘Powerful, capacious and profound’ OCEAN VUONG
‘A book you won’t soon forget’ ILYA KAMINSKY
‘Astonishing’ TERRANCE HAYES
A deeply powerful collection of poems about life in Gaza by award-winning Palestinian poet, Mosab Abu Toha.
Barely 30 years old, Mosab Abu Toha was already a well-known poet when the current assault on Gaza began. After the Israeli army bombed his house, pulverising 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 and lyrics about the poet’s wife, singing to his children to distract them. Huddled in the dark, Abu Toha remembers his grandfather’s oranges and his daughter’s joy in eating them. Here are poems to introduce readers to his extended family, some of them no longer with us.
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. This is an extraordinary and arrestingly whimsical book, that brings us indelible art in a time of terrible suffering.
Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza, winner of the Palestine Book Award 2022 and the American Book Award 2023
”'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
”'A glimpse into life in a besieged Gaza and what it’s like to survive and find care, even hope, under the most dire of conditions” - New York Times
”'If literature has any power to change the world or resist injustice, I think it must lie in the astounding poems of Mosab Abu Toha” - Noreen Masud, author of A Flat Place, in Guardian
”'[Abu Toha] fled with his family, writing this visceral poetry collection to capture his experiences” - iPaper
”'The poems in Mosab Abu Toha's Forest of Noise are urgent, prayerful howls in the bleakest of nights … each poetic line is, at its heart, a lifeline to survival” - Ada Limón, US Poet Laureate, author of The Hurting Kind
”'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 … This is powerful, impactful poetry, a book you won’t soon forget. Forgetting is not an option” - llya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic
”'Astonishing … 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
”'Essential … uses language to fight against those who would ignore his people’s plight” - Jhalak Review
”'By turns wry and bereft …Toha forces us to recognise the obliteration of potential wrought by genocide and apartheid … the voices we will never get to hear. This is a deeply clever book” - Susannah Dickey, author of Isdal
”'Mosab Abu Toha’s poems etch themselves in your heart like shrapnel transformed to flowers. They dress the wounds of the human soul” - Pascale Petit, author of The Huntress