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Forest of Noise
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE
FROM THE WINNER OF THE 2025 PULITZER PRIZE FOR COMMENTARY
A candid, horrific, and deeply touching new 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, 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 livable 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 arrestingly whimsical book. Searing and beautiful, it brings us indelible art in a time of terrible suffering.
FROM THE WINNER OF THE 2025 PULITZER PRIZE FOR COMMENTARY
A candid, horrific, and deeply touching new 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, 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 livable 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 arrestingly whimsical book. Searing and beautiful, it brings us indelible art in a time of terrible suffering.
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2024
About the author
Mosab Abu Toha
16 books729 followersMosab Abu Toha is the winner of a Palestine Book Award, an American Book Award, Walcott Poetry Prize, and also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry.
He is a Palestinian poet, scholar, and librarian who was born in Gaza and has spent his life there. He is the founder of the Edward Said Library, Gaza’s first English-language library. Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear is his debut book of poems. It won a 2022 Palestine Book Award and was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry.
In 2019-2020, Abu Toha was a Visiting Poet in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University.
Abu Toha is a columnist for Arrowsmith Press, and his writings from Gaza have also appeared in The Nation and Literary Hub. His poems have been published in Poetry, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and Poetry Daily, among others.
He is a Palestinian poet, scholar, and librarian who was born in Gaza and has spent his life there. He is the founder of the Edward Said Library, Gaza’s first English-language library. Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear is his debut book of poems. It won a 2022 Palestine Book Award and was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry.
In 2019-2020, Abu Toha was a Visiting Poet in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University.
Abu Toha is a columnist for Arrowsmith Press, and his writings from Gaza have also appeared in The Nation and Literary Hub. His poems have been published in Poetry, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and Poetry Daily, among others.
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November 6, 2024
‘Every house is my heart,’ writes Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha about his home in Gaza, ‘every hole in the earth is my wound.’ Written under an onslaught of bombardments and violence against the Palestinian people over the past year, Mosab Abu Toha’s second collection of poetry, Forest of Noise chronicles the daily horrors juxtaposed with the dreams of peaceful moments that only sharpen the trauma in contrast. ‘No need for radio: / we are the news’ he writes in the opening poem bearing a title, Younger than War, that instantly places us into the long tragic history of violent conflict that surpasses generations and brings new ones born into bloodshed. It is a bloodshed that is felt on every page of this harrowing collection as rubble and bodies are strew across the stanzas to focus our gaze directly into the horrors. Haunting, horrific, yet gorgeously captured and expressed, Forest of Noise demonstrates the growth of Mosab Abu Toha as a poet and chronicler of terror, but also as a deep feeling soul who uses his art to give voice to the hundreds of thousands trapped in these daily struggles. An important collection and an absolute must read.
What A Gazan Should Do During an Airstrike
Turn off the lights in every room / sit in the inner hallway of the house / away from the windows / stay away from the stove / stop thinking about making black tea / have a bottle of water nearby / big enough to cool down / children’s fear / get a child’s kindergarten backpack and stuff / tiny toys and whatever amount of money there is / and the ID cards / and photos of late grandparents, aunts, or uncles / and the grandparents’ wedding invitation that’s been kept for a long time / and if you are a farmer, you should put some strawberry seeds / in one pocket / and some soil from / the balcony flowerpot in the other / and hold on tight / to whatever number there was / on the cake / from the last birthday.
Having returned to Palestine shortly after completing his MFA and first collection, the incredibly moving Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, Abu Toha arrived just as the events of autumn 2023 were about to erupt into a long, costly mass violence against his people. Moving between moments of quietude to the surreal trauma of life under bombardment, Abu Toha renders daily life finding that ‘Death is always / sitting on my windowsill,’ moving through streets where ‘potholes from bombs are everywhere, / like crows’ nests in a forest of noise’ waking nightmares of running from blasts with a girl in his arms he knows is already dead but ‘you are alive / for a moment, / when living people / run after you,’ or removing rubble to find unidentifiable parts from bodies of children. Or sometimes nothing is left at all, ‘only rubble stays, waiting for a sunrise’ as he writes in Ramadan 2024. It’s daily horrors piled upon horrors for decades of people who have been driven from their lands and ignored by the outside world.
‘Sir, we are not welcome anywhere.
Only cemeteries don’t mind our bodies.
We no longer look for Palestine.
Our time is spent dying.
Soon, Palestine will search for us,
For our whispers, for our footsteps,
Our fading pictures fallen off blown-up walls.’
While these are poems that bear witness to tragedy and trauma and give voice to those who find themselves unheard by the world, Abu Toha says much of the purpose of these poems is ‘through poetry I try to understand better what happened.’ In an interview with PBS News Hour, Abu Toha explains that he writes because ‘what I have been living is more than I can explain to people, more than my language can express. So I tend to escape to poetry in order to try and express myself.’ It is a lot to bear and these poems are heartwrenching experiences put to paper, such as when he was kidnapped by IDF forces and detained for several days in November 2023, though these are also horrors that have been with him his entire life. ‘My losses started the day I was born,’ Abu Toha told NPR, ‘I lost my childhood. I'm a Palestinian refugee who lost 31 members of my extended family, who was wounded in an airstrike in 2009 when I was 16 years old, who lost his house, who lost 300 friends.’ It is a difficult burden, but one he must bear in order to survive as he writes in No Art:
I’ve personally lost three friends to war,
a city to darkness, and a language to fear.
This was not easy to survive,
but survival proved necessary to master.
Faced with all this, he sometimes asks himself ‘why the poem?’ as his action in the face of genocide. ‘The poem, for me, functioned as a report,’ he explained in a conversation with Electric Literature, ‘it preserves the experience and the feelings that come with it.’ I am reminded of the lines from William Carlos Williams that read ‘It is difficult / to get the news from poems / Yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there,’ but, as Abu Toha explains, the purpose isn’t necessarily about chronicling the hard facts of “news”:
For this reason, he explains, he writes his poems in English instead of Arabic:
I suspect this is also why readers will find many Western references in these poems in order to draw the reader into familiarity before shattering them by forcing us to confront the violence that permeates daily life. There are quotes by authors Western readers will likely be familiar with, such as Elizabeth Bishop or the famous line from Audre Lorde that ‘poetry is not a luxury’ and one particularly effective poem is an homage to Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl:
After Allen Ginsberg
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed in a tent,
looking for water and diapers for kids;
destroyed by bombs;
a generation under the rubble
of their bombed houses;
I saw the best brains of my generation
protruding from their slashed heads.
Committed to uniting Arabic culture and the English language as a way to reach the Western world, Abu Toha had also founded the first English library in Gaza, two branches both named after Edward Said, though both have now been destroyed by Israeli soldiers. ‘The loss of the library is not only about the loss of the books,’ he told PBS, ‘but also the loss of the readers, many of whom were killed.’ Here in Forest of Noise he builds a poem as a monument to their memory:
My Library
My books remain on the shelves as I left them last year,
but all the words have died.
I search for my favorite book
Out of Place.
I find it lying lonely in a drawer,
next to the photo album and my old Nokia phone.
The pen inside the book is still intact,
but some ink drops have leaked.
Some words breathe its ink,
the pen like a ventilator
for a dozen patients:
Home, Jerusalem, the sea, Haifa,
The rock, the oranges, the sand,
The pigeon, Cairo, my mother,
Beirut, books, the rock, the sea, the sea.
These are poems that read with pain from every page and even in the more tender moments when discussing his family there is a sorrow for the suffering they must endure. There is the moving yet haunting Love Poem to his wife in which he holds her tightly in his heart for ‘carry our home, our destroyed home / with you in your memories’ or listening to his poems, ‘your hand holding the pencil with me when my fingers freeze out of fear, / your name, / which reminds me there is a goal.’ Or there are moments of peacetime he shares with his children where ‘I ask her to remember, / not because I want to hear the story again, / but because I want to watch her face relive / the moment.’ The hurt faced by children is perhaps the most tragic and Abu Toha revisits his own childhood memories in My Dreams as a Child where his happiest dreams include ‘running for miles and miles’ where there were ‘no unexploded bombs / scaring me off’ or dreaming of picking oranges with his grandfather in the elders’s Yaffa orange groves. It is tragic to learn by the end of the poem that now:
‘my grandfather died,
Yaffa is occupied,
and oranges
no longer grow
in his weeping groves.’
This heartbreaking closing lines are paralleled in a later poem, Grandfather’s Well, which ends:
In the refugee camp,
Where land is strewn with
Debris, where air chokes with rage,
My harvest is yet to arrive,
My seeds only sprout on this page.
In this was we can see poetry as hope, a seed that can grow in the minds of others to hold them up in hard times or as a plea to the outside world to protect those in need. But, as we see in the final poem of the collection, poetry might not be enough and there is a fear that these poems might just become a quiet graveyard of memories if the onslaught of violence is not ceased. He writes:
This is not a poem.
This is a grave, not
beneath the soil of Homeland,
but above a flat, light white
rag of paper.
Mosab Abu Toha’s Forest of Noise is quite the achievement of poetic witness in times of extreme violence. A harrowing, heartwrenching collection that processes daily trauma into poetry that can be shared to spread awareness of the struggles and keep memory of those lost, Forest of Noise is a must read and easily one of the best collections of the year.
5/5
‘When we die, our souls leave our bodies,
take with them everything they loved
in our bedrooms: the perfume bottles,
the makeup, the necklaces, and the pens.
In Gaza, our bodies and rooms get crushed.
Nothing remains for the soul.
Even our souls,
they get stuck under the rubble for weeks.’
—from Under the Rubble
What A Gazan Should Do During an Airstrike
Turn off the lights in every room / sit in the inner hallway of the house / away from the windows / stay away from the stove / stop thinking about making black tea / have a bottle of water nearby / big enough to cool down / children’s fear / get a child’s kindergarten backpack and stuff / tiny toys and whatever amount of money there is / and the ID cards / and photos of late grandparents, aunts, or uncles / and the grandparents’ wedding invitation that’s been kept for a long time / and if you are a farmer, you should put some strawberry seeds / in one pocket / and some soil from / the balcony flowerpot in the other / and hold on tight / to whatever number there was / on the cake / from the last birthday.
Having returned to Palestine shortly after completing his MFA and first collection, the incredibly moving Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, Abu Toha arrived just as the events of autumn 2023 were about to erupt into a long, costly mass violence against his people. Moving between moments of quietude to the surreal trauma of life under bombardment, Abu Toha renders daily life finding that ‘Death is always / sitting on my windowsill,’ moving through streets where ‘potholes from bombs are everywhere, / like crows’ nests in a forest of noise’ waking nightmares of running from blasts with a girl in his arms he knows is already dead but ‘you are alive / for a moment, / when living people / run after you,’ or removing rubble to find unidentifiable parts from bodies of children. Or sometimes nothing is left at all, ‘only rubble stays, waiting for a sunrise’ as he writes in Ramadan 2024. It’s daily horrors piled upon horrors for decades of people who have been driven from their lands and ignored by the outside world.
‘Sir, we are not welcome anywhere.
Only cemeteries don’t mind our bodies.
We no longer look for Palestine.
Our time is spent dying.
Soon, Palestine will search for us,
For our whispers, for our footsteps,
Our fading pictures fallen off blown-up walls.’
While these are poems that bear witness to tragedy and trauma and give voice to those who find themselves unheard by the world, Abu Toha says much of the purpose of these poems is ‘through poetry I try to understand better what happened.’ In an interview with PBS News Hour, Abu Toha explains that he writes because ‘what I have been living is more than I can explain to people, more than my language can express. So I tend to escape to poetry in order to try and express myself.’ It is a lot to bear and these poems are heartwrenching experiences put to paper, such as when he was kidnapped by IDF forces and detained for several days in November 2023, though these are also horrors that have been with him his entire life. ‘My losses started the day I was born,’ Abu Toha told NPR, ‘I lost my childhood. I'm a Palestinian refugee who lost 31 members of my extended family, who was wounded in an airstrike in 2009 when I was 16 years old, who lost his house, who lost 300 friends.’ It is a difficult burden, but one he must bear in order to survive as he writes in No Art:
I’ve personally lost three friends to war,
a city to darkness, and a language to fear.
This was not easy to survive,
but survival proved necessary to master.
Faced with all this, he sometimes asks himself ‘why the poem?’ as his action in the face of genocide. ‘The poem, for me, functioned as a report,’ he explained in a conversation with Electric Literature, ‘it preserves the experience and the feelings that come with it.’ I am reminded of the lines from William Carlos Williams that read ‘It is difficult / to get the news from poems / Yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there,’ but, as Abu Toha explains, the purpose isn’t necessarily about chronicling the hard facts of “news”:
‘You can write a poem and post it, and people will see it and feel it…It’s not about numbers, or the name of the place or the name of the person killed. It’s about what it means to lose someone.’
For this reason, he explains, he writes his poems in English instead of Arabic:
‘The people who are responsible for this ongoing genocide are in the West, not in the Arab world. Why would I write in Arabic and tell people how I feel? …They know. They have more terrible stories than me. When I’m writing in English, it’s not a choice of language. It’s a choice of audiences.’
I suspect this is also why readers will find many Western references in these poems in order to draw the reader into familiarity before shattering them by forcing us to confront the violence that permeates daily life. There are quotes by authors Western readers will likely be familiar with, such as Elizabeth Bishop or the famous line from Audre Lorde that ‘poetry is not a luxury’ and one particularly effective poem is an homage to Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl:
After Allen Ginsberg
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed in a tent,
looking for water and diapers for kids;
destroyed by bombs;
a generation under the rubble
of their bombed houses;
I saw the best brains of my generation
protruding from their slashed heads.
Committed to uniting Arabic culture and the English language as a way to reach the Western world, Abu Toha had also founded the first English library in Gaza, two branches both named after Edward Said, though both have now been destroyed by Israeli soldiers. ‘The loss of the library is not only about the loss of the books,’ he told PBS, ‘but also the loss of the readers, many of whom were killed.’ Here in Forest of Noise he builds a poem as a monument to their memory:
My Library
My books remain on the shelves as I left them last year,
but all the words have died.
I search for my favorite book
Out of Place.
I find it lying lonely in a drawer,
next to the photo album and my old Nokia phone.
The pen inside the book is still intact,
but some ink drops have leaked.
Some words breathe its ink,
the pen like a ventilator
for a dozen patients:
Home, Jerusalem, the sea, Haifa,
The rock, the oranges, the sand,
The pigeon, Cairo, my mother,
Beirut, books, the rock, the sea, the sea.
These are poems that read with pain from every page and even in the more tender moments when discussing his family there is a sorrow for the suffering they must endure. There is the moving yet haunting Love Poem to his wife in which he holds her tightly in his heart for ‘carry our home, our destroyed home / with you in your memories’ or listening to his poems, ‘your hand holding the pencil with me when my fingers freeze out of fear, / your name, / which reminds me there is a goal.’ Or there are moments of peacetime he shares with his children where ‘I ask her to remember, / not because I want to hear the story again, / but because I want to watch her face relive / the moment.’ The hurt faced by children is perhaps the most tragic and Abu Toha revisits his own childhood memories in My Dreams as a Child where his happiest dreams include ‘running for miles and miles’ where there were ‘no unexploded bombs / scaring me off’ or dreaming of picking oranges with his grandfather in the elders’s Yaffa orange groves. It is tragic to learn by the end of the poem that now:
‘my grandfather died,
Yaffa is occupied,
and oranges
no longer grow
in his weeping groves.’
This heartbreaking closing lines are paralleled in a later poem, Grandfather’s Well, which ends:
In the refugee camp,
Where land is strewn with
Debris, where air chokes with rage,
My harvest is yet to arrive,
My seeds only sprout on this page.
In this was we can see poetry as hope, a seed that can grow in the minds of others to hold them up in hard times or as a plea to the outside world to protect those in need. But, as we see in the final poem of the collection, poetry might not be enough and there is a fear that these poems might just become a quiet graveyard of memories if the onslaught of violence is not ceased. He writes:
This is not a poem.
This is a grave, not
beneath the soil of Homeland,
but above a flat, light white
rag of paper.
Mosab Abu Toha’s Forest of Noise is quite the achievement of poetic witness in times of extreme violence. A harrowing, heartwrenching collection that processes daily trauma into poetry that can be shared to spread awareness of the struggles and keep memory of those lost, Forest of Noise is a must read and easily one of the best collections of the year.
5/5
‘When we die, our souls leave our bodies,
take with them everything they loved
in our bedrooms: the perfume bottles,
the makeup, the necklaces, and the pens.
In Gaza, our bodies and rooms get crushed.
Nothing remains for the soul.
Even our souls,
they get stuck under the rubble for weeks.’
—from Under the Rubble
Want to Read
March 20, 2025🍉
Read
December 13, 2024"You are alive for a moment when living people run after you"
Putting a star rating on this book would feel inappropriate, it's not a work I "liked", the poems are beautifully written, don't get me wrong there is unquestionable skills displayed here but the poems come from a place of ongoing pain and cruelty enacted on a people it's not something that one can like reading about. I didn't rate Things You May Find Hidden in my Ear either, which was also stunningly written, so I'm going to stick with that pattern, still this book deserves endless praises.
Putting a star rating on this book would feel inappropriate, it's not a work I "liked", the poems are beautifully written, don't get me wrong there is unquestionable skills displayed here but the poems come from a place of ongoing pain and cruelty enacted on a people it's not something that one can like reading about. I didn't rate Things You May Find Hidden in my Ear either, which was also stunningly written, so I'm going to stick with that pattern, still this book deserves endless praises.
December 28, 2024
Reading this hurt, and I mean that as a compliment, because the author paints such a vivid portrait of life in wartime Gaza. These poems are unsettling, disturbing and beautiful. They will trouble you in the best way. This is the kind of art that can make a real difference in the world.
July 27, 2024
This devasting collection of poetry shows the multi-generational struggle of those living in Gaza. Toha paints a horrific picture of the conditions in Gaza, describing the lack of food, being welcome nowhere, the need to travel for basic medical care, and how many mourn the births of their children, of the conditions they are being born into.
I lost count of how many times he said shrapnel, explosion, rubble, and bomb.
This poetry book is so important for understanding the conditions in Gaza, and everyone should read this book to learn and to support this poet and his family. It is not for the light of heart, but all should still read.
"No need for the radio: We are the news."
I lost count of how many times he said shrapnel, explosion, rubble, and bomb.
This poetry book is so important for understanding the conditions in Gaza, and everyone should read this book to learn and to support this poet and his family. It is not for the light of heart, but all should still read.
"No need for the radio: We are the news."
July 20, 2025
Her dreams,
she threw them onto the closest sea wave
and that wave
never returned
*
We stuff our suitcases with pictures and memories.
They feel very heavy on the ground;
we can’t carry them, neither can the roads.
They scar the surface of the earth.
*
In my ears, I’m hiding
my mother’s stories,
my father’s recitation
of the Holy Quran when I am sick,
the sound of my childhood alarm clock ringing
when I open my eyes for school.
she threw them onto the closest sea wave
and that wave
never returned
*
We stuff our suitcases with pictures and memories.
They feel very heavy on the ground;
we can’t carry them, neither can the roads.
They scar the surface of the earth.
*
In my ears, I’m hiding
my mother’s stories,
my father’s recitation
of the Holy Quran when I am sick,
the sound of my childhood alarm clock ringing
when I open my eyes for school.
June 7, 2026
to God we belong, and to His power, judgement, and justice we will return
January 8, 2025
Forest of Noise: Poems - Mosab Abu Toha
مختارات ترجمتها من الديوان:
This is not a poem. This is a grave, not beneath the soil of Homeland, but above a flat, light white rag of paper.
هذه ليست قصيدة. هذا قبر، ليسَ تحت تراب الوطن، بل فوق قطعة بالية بيضاء ومسطحة وخفيفة من الورق.
You are alive for a moment, when living people run after you.
أنتَ حيٌّ لـ لحظة، عندما يركض الأحياء خلفك.
I’m nameless for the first time. I’m stateless for a long time. I don’t know what time it is right now.
أنا بلا اسم لأول مرة. أنا بلا وطن منذُ فترة طويلة. لا أعرف ما الوقت الآن.
Where should people go? Should they build a big ladder and go up? But heaven has been blocked by the drones and F-16s and the smoke of death.
إلى أين يذهب الناس؟ هل عليهم بناء سلم كبير ثم الصعود؟ لكن السماء محجوبة بالطائرات بدون طيار وطائرات إف
16 ودخان الموت.
I look around and see many things, but I see no one.
أنظر حولي وأرى أشياء كثيرة، لكنني لا أرى أحدًا.
My books remain on the shelves as I left them last year, but all the words have died.
كتبي لا تزال على الرفوف كما تركتها العام الماضي، لكن كل الكلمات ماتت.
Now it’s 2024, and the cemetery you were buried in was razed by Israeli bulldozers and tanks. How can I find you now? Will my bones find yours after I die?
نحن الآن في العام 2024، والمقبرة التي دفنتَ فيها دُمرت بالجرافات والدبابات الإسرائيلية. كيف ٍسأعثرُ عليك الآن؟
هل ستجد عظامي عظامك بعد أن أموت؟
~
ديوان مصعب أبو توهة الجديد، عن الحياة في غزة قبل الإبادة وخلالها، عن محاولات النجاة اليومية وسط احتلال وقصف وموت، عن أشقائه الذين رحلوا-قبل الإبادة، عن اعتقاله واختفائه خلال هذه الإبادة، عن برتقال جده وعن أمه وعائلته التي تركها في الشمال، وعن الأطفال ومعاناتهم وأمهات غزة وعن البيوت الشوارع والمدارس وعن الموت اليومي وعن مكتبته التي دمرت في القصف.
قصائد واضحة وقويّة تقدّم صورة لزمن الحرب والإبادة-وقبلها ومعاناة أهل غزة المستمرة والدائمة.
قصائد قصيرة ومدهشة، من تلك التي ستبقى في قلبك إلى الأبد.
مختارات ترجمتها من الديوان:
This is not a poem. This is a grave, not beneath the soil of Homeland, but above a flat, light white rag of paper.
هذه ليست قصيدة. هذا قبر، ليسَ تحت تراب الوطن، بل فوق قطعة بالية بيضاء ومسطحة وخفيفة من الورق.
You are alive for a moment, when living people run after you.
أنتَ حيٌّ لـ لحظة، عندما يركض الأحياء خلفك.
I’m nameless for the first time. I’m stateless for a long time. I don’t know what time it is right now.
أنا بلا اسم لأول مرة. أنا بلا وطن منذُ فترة طويلة. لا أعرف ما الوقت الآن.
Where should people go? Should they build a big ladder and go up? But heaven has been blocked by the drones and F-16s and the smoke of death.
إلى أين يذهب الناس؟ هل عليهم بناء سلم كبير ثم الصعود؟ لكن السماء محجوبة بالطائرات بدون طيار وطائرات إف
16 ودخان الموت.
I look around and see many things, but I see no one.
أنظر حولي وأرى أشياء كثيرة، لكنني لا أرى أحدًا.
My books remain on the shelves as I left them last year, but all the words have died.
كتبي لا تزال على الرفوف كما تركتها العام الماضي، لكن كل الكلمات ماتت.
Now it’s 2024, and the cemetery you were buried in was razed by Israeli bulldozers and tanks. How can I find you now? Will my bones find yours after I die?
نحن الآن في العام 2024، والمقبرة التي دفنتَ فيها دُمرت بالجرافات والدبابات الإسرائيلية. كيف ٍسأعثرُ عليك الآن؟
هل ستجد عظامي عظامك بعد أن أموت؟
~
ديوان مصعب أبو توهة الجديد، عن الحياة في غزة قبل الإبادة وخلالها، عن محاولات النجاة اليومية وسط احتلال وقصف وموت، عن أشقائه الذين رحلوا-قبل الإبادة، عن اعتقاله واختفائه خلال هذه الإبادة، عن برتقال جده وعن أمه وعائلته التي تركها في الشمال، وعن الأطفال ومعاناتهم وأمهات غزة وعن البيوت الشوارع والمدارس وعن الموت اليومي وعن مكتبته التي دمرت في القصف.
قصائد واضحة وقويّة تقدّم صورة لزمن الحرب والإبادة-وقبلها ومعاناة أهل غزة المستمرة والدائمة.
قصائد قصيرة ومدهشة، من تلك التي ستبقى في قلبك إلى الأبد.
December 2, 2024
A poetry collection about life in Gaza from a Palestinian poet forced to flee his home following the relentless bombings from Israel that began after October 7. 2023. These poems are emotional as hell. I didn’t cry, but I certainly welled up. More than once. There is a lot of range in this collection while still remaining extremely accessible, even fore a poetry newb like me.
August 31, 2025
“Poetry is not a luxury” - Audre Lorde. This collection of poems about life in Gaza by Mosab Abu Toha is both beautiful and aching in its simple depictions of being a person, while existing through a world where your personhood is denied.
July 13, 2024
"There is a dog giving birth to seven puppies
beneath a white mulberry tree under the clear night sky.
The dog groans with pain,
puppy after puppy cries, unaware where they are.
For them, it's still dark, whether in her belly or outside.
What country are we in?
That's not a questions for a puppy to ask.
Only mother dog and the soil beneath can hear
the branch of the mulberry tree ---
for every moan
a blossom comes out.
From her bedroom window, a mother, still awake,
watches the dog, its puppies, and the mulberry trees,
while her child, eyes closed, suckles from her breast.
And the drone watches all."
beneath a white mulberry tree under the clear night sky.
The dog groans with pain,
puppy after puppy cries, unaware where they are.
For them, it's still dark, whether in her belly or outside.
What country are we in?
That's not a questions for a puppy to ask.
Only mother dog and the soil beneath can hear
the branch of the mulberry tree ---
for every moan
a blossom comes out.
From her bedroom window, a mother, still awake,
watches the dog, its puppies, and the mulberry trees,
while her child, eyes closed, suckles from her breast.
And the drone watches all."
May 22, 2025
Forrest of Noise by Mosab Abu Toha - Pulitzer Prize winner 2025, is full of hope and devestation, hope and hopelessness, of hope and desperation from what we are witnessing. You feel the words... none of us are immune to the pain and suffering bestowed upon the Palestinian people. And this book of poems reminds us of that and of our humanity and duty to it.
How much more must be endured...?
"Never again" has never felt so meaningless.
Poems to make you feel - something - anything.
How much more must be endured...?
"Never again" has never felt so meaningless.
Poems to make you feel - something - anything.
October 8, 2024
absolutely wrecked by this one. 😭❤️🩹
these words from a brilliant palestinian poet… i’m in awe. undone. weeping. completely gutted by how visceral these poems are. to read of life in gaza, of how utterly devastating the relentless war has been, of families literally blown apart… i don’t have words.
the alchemy of turning such atrocity into such art…
the strength it takes to sift through the wreckage to tell the story…
this is a must read.
we cannot turn away, we cannot forget, we cannot ignore. we must look and listen and love and learn. we must make this stop. we have lost too many already and we cannot stand to lose more.
@mosab_abutoha — thank you. i’m so sorry. we won’t stop until all are free.
these words from a brilliant palestinian poet… i’m in awe. undone. weeping. completely gutted by how visceral these poems are. to read of life in gaza, of how utterly devastating the relentless war has been, of families literally blown apart… i don’t have words.
the alchemy of turning such atrocity into such art…
the strength it takes to sift through the wreckage to tell the story…
this is a must read.
we cannot turn away, we cannot forget, we cannot ignore. we must look and listen and love and learn. we must make this stop. we have lost too many already and we cannot stand to lose more.
@mosab_abutoha — thank you. i’m so sorry. we won’t stop until all are free.
May 26, 2025
A collection of poetry detailing the horrors of living through occupation and bombings as a parent of young children in early 2020s Gaza. Read by the author, these poems offer an eye-opening and heartbreaking contrast of what life before and during the war on Palestine looked like for everyday families just trying to survive. I didn't love the author's narration but he still manages to bring lots of emotion to his reading. Highly recommended but perhaps better read in print.
July 25, 2024
Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for providing me with an ARC of this book !
"Sir, we are not welcome anywhere.
Only cemeteries don't mind our bodies."
Forest of Noise is a horrifying and brutally honest depiction of life in Gaza. Every page told a different, yet eerily similar tale of injustice and cruelty.
Although the book was short, it took me a while to get through it because of how uncomfortable it made me feel. That being said, Forest of Noise will not only disturb you, it will also enlighten those who still continue to turn a blind eye from the painstaking truth of the realities taking place in the land of Palestinian people.
This is not just a recommended read, but a necessary one.
"Sir, we are not welcome anywhere.
Only cemeteries don't mind our bodies."
Forest of Noise is a horrifying and brutally honest depiction of life in Gaza. Every page told a different, yet eerily similar tale of injustice and cruelty.
Although the book was short, it took me a while to get through it because of how uncomfortable it made me feel. That being said, Forest of Noise will not only disturb you, it will also enlighten those who still continue to turn a blind eye from the painstaking truth of the realities taking place in the land of Palestinian people.
This is not just a recommended read, but a necessary one.
July 26, 2024
Earlier this year, I read “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza” and was extremely moved by it. With that in mind, I was thrilled and grateful to have been given the opportunity to read an advanced copy of Forest of Noise by Mosab Abu Toha, his upcoming poetry collection, so thank you to Knopf and NetGalley!
Reviewing and rating a collection like this is challenging. It is a living, breathing narrative, unfolding in real time, reflecting current horrors. Both of Mosab’s books are unlike anything I've ever read. Mosab’s words are harrowing, deeply personal, and moving. I am in awe of this author and the vulnerability expressed on every page!
Reviewing and rating a collection like this is challenging. It is a living, breathing narrative, unfolding in real time, reflecting current horrors. Both of Mosab’s books are unlike anything I've ever read. Mosab’s words are harrowing, deeply personal, and moving. I am in awe of this author and the vulnerability expressed on every page!
October 18, 2024
In the refugee camp,
where land is strewn with
debris, where air chokes with rage,
my harvest is yet to arrive,
my seeds only sprout on this page.
— "My Grandfather's Well"
FOREST OF NOISE is a breathtaking and heartbreaking collection from Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toham, which explores the ongoing struggles of living in an occupied country and how those struggles can infect the small moments of joy. He worries about his family still living in Gaza, he mourns the family he has lost. F-16s replace birdsong, but the old house keys survive. Essential reading.
where land is strewn with
debris, where air chokes with rage,
my harvest is yet to arrive,
my seeds only sprout on this page.
— "My Grandfather's Well"
FOREST OF NOISE is a breathtaking and heartbreaking collection from Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toham, which explores the ongoing struggles of living in an occupied country and how those struggles can infect the small moments of joy. He worries about his family still living in Gaza, he mourns the family he has lost. F-16s replace birdsong, but the old house keys survive. Essential reading.
September 15, 2024
ARC gifted by the publisher
Powerful poems about the violence in Gaza and longing for Palestine. I love his poetry because it’s very easy to read yet the emotional resonance is strong. A timely and urgent collection that deserves all our attention
Powerful poems about the violence in Gaza and longing for Palestine. I love his poetry because it’s very easy to read yet the emotional resonance is strong. A timely and urgent collection that deserves all our attention
November 16, 2024
To start this review, I would like to share one of the most impactful poems in this collection,
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed in a tent,
looking for water and diapers for kids;
destroyed by bombs;
a generation under the rubble
of their bombed houses;
I saw the best brains of my generation
protruding from their slashed heads.
This collection of poems spans several years, capturing Mosab Abu Toha’s survival through multiple attacks on Gaza. The poems chronicle life in Gaza, juxtaposing the horrors of oppression with fleeting moments of joy. Abu Toha shines a spotlight on the ongoing tragedies in Palestine while reminding readers that the violence we witness today is a continuation of the Nakba and the enduring legacy of colonial oppression.
The poems delve deeply into the violence inflicted on Palestine, the anger towards those who remain indifferent, and the exhaustion and despair of living amid unrelenting tragedy. They explore the conflicting emotions of enduring a reality the world seems to accept for Palestinians, while expressing a haunting fear that Palestinians might one day be remembered solely for the violence they have suffered. Who will tell their stories? Who will write their books? Who will ensure a future for their poets and prevent Palestinians from becoming just a memory? Mosab Abu Toha implores readers to confront these questions and the injustices that led to them. As a reader, I wish there were answers—ways to alleviate the suffering and fears of Palestinians and to affirm their voices and humanity for generations to come.
Thank you to the publisher, Knopf, for an E-ARC of this collection in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are my own!
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed in a tent,
looking for water and diapers for kids;
destroyed by bombs;
a generation under the rubble
of their bombed houses;
I saw the best brains of my generation
protruding from their slashed heads.
This collection of poems spans several years, capturing Mosab Abu Toha’s survival through multiple attacks on Gaza. The poems chronicle life in Gaza, juxtaposing the horrors of oppression with fleeting moments of joy. Abu Toha shines a spotlight on the ongoing tragedies in Palestine while reminding readers that the violence we witness today is a continuation of the Nakba and the enduring legacy of colonial oppression.
The poems delve deeply into the violence inflicted on Palestine, the anger towards those who remain indifferent, and the exhaustion and despair of living amid unrelenting tragedy. They explore the conflicting emotions of enduring a reality the world seems to accept for Palestinians, while expressing a haunting fear that Palestinians might one day be remembered solely for the violence they have suffered. Who will tell their stories? Who will write their books? Who will ensure a future for their poets and prevent Palestinians from becoming just a memory? Mosab Abu Toha implores readers to confront these questions and the injustices that led to them. As a reader, I wish there were answers—ways to alleviate the suffering and fears of Palestinians and to affirm their voices and humanity for generations to come.
Thank you to the publisher, Knopf, for an E-ARC of this collection in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are my own!
November 3, 2024
I just finished reading it and don't know what to write... What aches inside is that Allah has given us all the means, wealth, and power to stop this genocide... Two Billion Muslims with all kinds of natural resources are acting cowards.... It is not the test of Palestinians; they will be successful, IA. It is the test for the rest of us as Muslims... and Allah will ask us what we did for them.....
Read
February 20, 2025This was the first time I read a poetry collection via an audiobook and this is the way these poems were meant to be read. When listening to Mosab Abu Toha read his own words, it is clear that English is not his first language, and that changes the context.
These poems are for you. These poems are a call to action.
Do not forget the people of Palestine.
These poems are for you. These poems are a call to action.
Do not forget the people of Palestine.
Read
March 10, 2026may Palestine be free in this lifetime and may their oppressors be forever destroyed.
Read
May 6, 2025"If you live in Gaza, you die several times."
Los poemas no son muy de mi estilo porque son demasiado literales (y a veces tiene un verso muy bueno que deshace explicándolo justo a continuación), pero con la crudeza del tema se complica todo un poco. Supongo que no queda otra que ser todo lo evidente que eres capaz de ser, con una masacre como la de Gaza. Me han gustado mucho "A Request", "After Allen Ginsberg" y el final de "True or False: A Test by a Gazan Child".
Los poemas no son muy de mi estilo porque son demasiado literales (y a veces tiene un verso muy bueno que deshace explicándolo justo a continuación), pero con la crudeza del tema se complica todo un poco. Supongo que no queda otra que ser todo lo evidente que eres capaz de ser, con una masacre como la de Gaza. Me han gustado mucho "A Request", "After Allen Ginsberg" y el final de "True or False: A Test by a Gazan Child".
December 2, 2025
"A candid, horrific, and deeply touching new collection of poems about life in Gaza by an award-winning Palestinian poet."
This poetry anthology introduced the reader not only to the horrors of living in war-torn Gaza but the beauty of life before it. I learned much about the abundance of life and colour and vitality that dwelled there prior, and was so mercilessly stripped away. This was a book full of heartbreak but also of hope, and an important read for all.
This poetry anthology introduced the reader not only to the horrors of living in war-torn Gaza but the beauty of life before it. I learned much about the abundance of life and colour and vitality that dwelled there prior, and was so mercilessly stripped away. This was a book full of heartbreak but also of hope, and an important read for all.
September 15, 2024
But in my city, streets are never flat.
Potholes from bombs are everywhere,
like crows' nests in a forest of noise.
This collection of poems is an experience, and it feels somewhat pointless to try to describe them when really you should do just that — experience them for yourself. Mosab Abu Toha blends the mundanities of everyday life with the brutality and absurdity of occupation and war, creating images that are often familiar and lovely and (even more often) absolutely horrific. You will recognize the people in these poems and how they reflect your own family, friends, neighbors, yourself. They are ordinary people, trying to live ordinary lives; but they are Palestinian, and that means they are forced to endure horrors few of us can even conceive of. It's gut-wrenching to sit with, and a rightful condemnation of our failed humanity.
A few favorite passages:
At the time,
I was seven:
decades younger than war,
a few years older than bombs.
_
I changed the order of books on the shelves.
Two days later, the war broke out.
Beware of changing the order of your books!
—
Home, Jerusalem, the sea, Haifa,
the rock, the oranges, the sand,
the pigeon, Cairo, my mother,
Beirut, books, the rock, the sea, the sea.
—
And all of "The Moon," "What a Gazan Should Do During an Israeli Air Strike," and "For a Moment" are stunning.
This is a strong 4 / 4.5 stars and recommended reading for everyone. While Abu Toha certainly succeeds in documenting life in Gaza and kindling art from unspeakable tragedy, it's often not a style of poetry that I personally gravitate towards. This is purely a "me" thing and not a comment on his obvious talent and voice as a poet, but 4 stars (instead of 5) feels like a fair reflection of that.
Thanks to Knopf Books and Goodreads Giveaways for the opportunity to read and review this ARC.
Potholes from bombs are everywhere,
like crows' nests in a forest of noise.
This collection of poems is an experience, and it feels somewhat pointless to try to describe them when really you should do just that — experience them for yourself. Mosab Abu Toha blends the mundanities of everyday life with the brutality and absurdity of occupation and war, creating images that are often familiar and lovely and (even more often) absolutely horrific. You will recognize the people in these poems and how they reflect your own family, friends, neighbors, yourself. They are ordinary people, trying to live ordinary lives; but they are Palestinian, and that means they are forced to endure horrors few of us can even conceive of. It's gut-wrenching to sit with, and a rightful condemnation of our failed humanity.
A few favorite passages:
At the time,
I was seven:
decades younger than war,
a few years older than bombs.
_
I changed the order of books on the shelves.
Two days later, the war broke out.
Beware of changing the order of your books!
—
Home, Jerusalem, the sea, Haifa,
the rock, the oranges, the sand,
the pigeon, Cairo, my mother,
Beirut, books, the rock, the sea, the sea.
—
And all of "The Moon," "What a Gazan Should Do During an Israeli Air Strike," and "For a Moment" are stunning.
This is a strong 4 / 4.5 stars and recommended reading for everyone. While Abu Toha certainly succeeds in documenting life in Gaza and kindling art from unspeakable tragedy, it's often not a style of poetry that I personally gravitate towards. This is purely a "me" thing and not a comment on his obvious talent and voice as a poet, but 4 stars (instead of 5) feels like a fair reflection of that.
Thanks to Knopf Books and Goodreads Giveaways for the opportunity to read and review this ARC.
May 22, 2026
The sky should be filled with bright blue and cotton-soft clouds, not danger and intense, shocking sounds that sculpt over the smoke. A road should be a path to the places where one can explore, not one to run away from. The tears wouldn’t be enough to clothe the terrain with compassion. The children are suffering, and they pray for the lives they have. Only to Palestine, my call upon God couldn’t be compared, for their sufferings are the sufferings to the world. How could we not notice it? Perhaps until the earth is flooded by the tears, leaving nothing but a mote, once again, then we’ll notice.
Read
January 6, 2025I can't bring myself to give this book a star rating. It is often beautiful, but always heartbreaking. Many of the poems are sparse and bleak. It's unimaginable to me that Mosab Abu Toha wrote this amid a genocide of his people, after he himself was kidnapped and tortured, and then left his homeland with his wife and three young kids. Not to mention that it's written almost entirely in English, instead of his native tongue, so that we can read it and try to understand what he is going through. It's powerful and well worth your time.
May 31, 2026
Tak często dzieje się, że literatura wyrosła z serc twórców mieszkających w danym rejonie lub dorastających w niespokojnych czasach niesie w sobie to znamię – nasiona, drobiny, zmiany w kodzie, nierozerwalnie z nią złączone i kryjące się w jej najdrobniejszych szczegółach. W ostatnich latach częściej spoglądam w stronę twórczości palestyńskiej, która na tych „zmianach w kodzie” buduje swą potęgę. A szczególnie popatruję na Mosaba Abu Toha, jak na najjaśniejszą gwiazdę na niebie. Żyję nadzieję, że kiedyś spotkamy się w innych okolicznościach, innej, cieplejszej, stabilniejszej perspektywie, w szczęśliwym tłumie, a przyjaznej ciszy.
Z drugiej strony możecie zadać sobie pytanie, a w jaki inny sposób możliwe jest teraz pisać o Gazie? Już nie mówiąc o tym, że patrząc na polityczne komentarze, przewidywania mądrzejszych od nas i kolejne akty ludobójstwa w Palestynie oraz sąsiednich państwach, czy niedługo będzie o czym pisać? Zgłębiając literaturę palestyńską nie da się oderwać od katastrofizmu, ponieważ kiedyś wszyscy będą przeciwko, lecz jeszcze nie teraz i może będzie za późno. Jednak dlatego tak bardzo lubię teksty tego właśnie poety, ponieważ przedstawia perspektywę tak daleką od mojej i sprawia, że od nowa stoję prosto i podnoszę głowę do góry, choć nie wiem, na co natknę się w wiadomościach (o państwie tak mi obcym i dalekim fizycznie, a jednak tak bliskim sercu). Mosab Abu Toha składa świadectwo o rzeczach, których moje oczy wolałyby unikać, ale też o tak pięknych doświadczeniach, o których nie wolno nam zapomnieć. W jego poezji lęk przed tym, gdzie spoczną prochy jego i jego ukochanych, żałoba za straconymi niewinnymi, która nie posiada granic oraz terror, którego nie potrafimy sobie nawet samodzielnie wyobrazić, łączy się w naturalny sposób z przepięknymi obrazami jego domu i ziemi ojczystej, umiłowaniem i uhonorowaniem historii jego rodziny i bliskich, twarzami na zawsze przez jego słowa uświęconymi i blaskiem w oczach jego dzieci, niewyobrażalnie poruszającym obrazem domu, który mimo wszelkich sprzeczności i gróźb dla nich tworzy. To dziedzictwo, które już raz zamknięte w tekście, już nigdy nie odejdzie, zostanie sercach twórcy, czytelników i tych literacko unieśmiertelnionych, paradoksalnie nieważne, co się stanie, kiedy świat pęka w połowie. Migawki bywają tak porażające i żywe, że równocześnie utrzymują przy życiu nadzieję, wiarę, że to nie może wygasnąć, musi zostać, ślady pozostają na kuli ziemskiej i punktach widzenia. Podczas pisania tej recenzji zdałam sobie sprawę, że niczego w tej chwili nie pragnę bardziej, niż stanąć kiedyś bezpiecznie na ziemi palestyńskiej.
Jest to twierdzenie typowe dla myślenia niebezpiecznie idealistycznego, ale ja naprawdę wierzę, że angażując się w kulturę państw zagrożonych, dokładamy swoją małą cegiełkę, by nie pozwolić im odejść.
A Palestynie tak silnie bije serce.
Z drugiej strony możecie zadać sobie pytanie, a w jaki inny sposób możliwe jest teraz pisać o Gazie? Już nie mówiąc o tym, że patrząc na polityczne komentarze, przewidywania mądrzejszych od nas i kolejne akty ludobójstwa w Palestynie oraz sąsiednich państwach, czy niedługo będzie o czym pisać? Zgłębiając literaturę palestyńską nie da się oderwać od katastrofizmu, ponieważ kiedyś wszyscy będą przeciwko, lecz jeszcze nie teraz i może będzie za późno. Jednak dlatego tak bardzo lubię teksty tego właśnie poety, ponieważ przedstawia perspektywę tak daleką od mojej i sprawia, że od nowa stoję prosto i podnoszę głowę do góry, choć nie wiem, na co natknę się w wiadomościach (o państwie tak mi obcym i dalekim fizycznie, a jednak tak bliskim sercu). Mosab Abu Toha składa świadectwo o rzeczach, których moje oczy wolałyby unikać, ale też o tak pięknych doświadczeniach, o których nie wolno nam zapomnieć. W jego poezji lęk przed tym, gdzie spoczną prochy jego i jego ukochanych, żałoba za straconymi niewinnymi, która nie posiada granic oraz terror, którego nie potrafimy sobie nawet samodzielnie wyobrazić, łączy się w naturalny sposób z przepięknymi obrazami jego domu i ziemi ojczystej, umiłowaniem i uhonorowaniem historii jego rodziny i bliskich, twarzami na zawsze przez jego słowa uświęconymi i blaskiem w oczach jego dzieci, niewyobrażalnie poruszającym obrazem domu, który mimo wszelkich sprzeczności i gróźb dla nich tworzy. To dziedzictwo, które już raz zamknięte w tekście, już nigdy nie odejdzie, zostanie sercach twórcy, czytelników i tych literacko unieśmiertelnionych, paradoksalnie nieważne, co się stanie, kiedy świat pęka w połowie. Migawki bywają tak porażające i żywe, że równocześnie utrzymują przy życiu nadzieję, wiarę, że to nie może wygasnąć, musi zostać, ślady pozostają na kuli ziemskiej i punktach widzenia. Podczas pisania tej recenzji zdałam sobie sprawę, że niczego w tej chwili nie pragnę bardziej, niż stanąć kiedyś bezpiecznie na ziemi palestyńskiej.
Jest to twierdzenie typowe dla myślenia niebezpiecznie idealistycznego, ale ja naprawdę wierzę, że angażując się w kulturę państw zagrożonych, dokładamy swoją małą cegiełkę, by nie pozwolić im odejść.
A Palestynie tak silnie bije serce.
April 22, 2025
Beautiful and heartbreaking. 🇵🇸 🍉
August 7, 2024
Mosab Abu Toha's new collection of poetry is breathtaking and heart wrenching. Written before, during, and after the author's escape from the current Israeli bombardment and desired eradication of Palistenians, "Forest of Noise" grapples with questions of the possibility of a future for a people who - and a culture that - are being systematically destroyed. Peering into his own personal history and seeing similar destruction since the 1948 Nakba, Abu Toha constantly reinvents what "home" could mean without a Homeland to return to.
The ancient key passed down through generations that no longer opens a door to a house in Yaffa that is long gone, gripped in the dead hands of a man killed in a refugee camp; the dreams of a child who is unable to accurately draw the images that he has woken up from and uses all the paper trying to render those liminal images to find comfort; the author's own dreams of all the things out of his grasp as a child - rooms filled with toys, trips on planes, being able to cross borders unencumbered, seeing animals in person only learned about from books... each page is an ode to a future that could be and simultaneously can never be.
Abu Toha quotes Audre Lorde as an epigraph: "Poetry is not a luxury" and throughout "Forest of Noise" proves again and again that poetry is essential because it is an element that cannot be taken away despite all other physical possessions and keepsakes destroyed and left beneath piles of rubble. Poetry is something that has the power of creation, breathing the word of truth into the ether to imagine a new world, bemoan the current one, and wrestle with how one can exist between despair and hope at the same time.
While not necessarily hope-full, "Forest of Noise" has a chimera of hope in its margins even in the most harrowing of poems - all might be lost, relatives gone, one's very Homeland destroyed, but, Inshallah, I write and dream, Abu Toha calls forth beyond his words. The neighbors and loved ones lying dead or buried beneath rubble, he says: I can remember, record, and dream of them still, run after them, as in "For A Moment", even though they may be dead, "you are alive / for a moment, / when living people / run after you."
The ancient key passed down through generations that no longer opens a door to a house in Yaffa that is long gone, gripped in the dead hands of a man killed in a refugee camp; the dreams of a child who is unable to accurately draw the images that he has woken up from and uses all the paper trying to render those liminal images to find comfort; the author's own dreams of all the things out of his grasp as a child - rooms filled with toys, trips on planes, being able to cross borders unencumbered, seeing animals in person only learned about from books... each page is an ode to a future that could be and simultaneously can never be.
Abu Toha quotes Audre Lorde as an epigraph: "Poetry is not a luxury" and throughout "Forest of Noise" proves again and again that poetry is essential because it is an element that cannot be taken away despite all other physical possessions and keepsakes destroyed and left beneath piles of rubble. Poetry is something that has the power of creation, breathing the word of truth into the ether to imagine a new world, bemoan the current one, and wrestle with how one can exist between despair and hope at the same time.
While not necessarily hope-full, "Forest of Noise" has a chimera of hope in its margins even in the most harrowing of poems - all might be lost, relatives gone, one's very Homeland destroyed, but, Inshallah, I write and dream, Abu Toha calls forth beyond his words. The neighbors and loved ones lying dead or buried beneath rubble, he says: I can remember, record, and dream of them still, run after them, as in "For A Moment", even though they may be dead, "you are alive / for a moment, / when living people / run after you."
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