Forest of Noise

MOSAB ABU TOHA is a Palestinian poet, short story writer and essayist from Gaza. His first collection of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and won the Palestine Book Award, the American Book Award and the Walcott Poetry Prize. Abu Toha is also the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza, which he hopes to rebuild. He recently won an Overseas Press Club Award for his Letter from Gaza columns for The New Yorker.

‘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‘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‘Toha forces us to recognise the obliteration of potential wrought by genocide and apartheid … 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‘Full of fury and longing, an emblem of the richness of Palestinian culture’ Lindsey Hilsum, The List‘Deeply powerful … an urgent and essential must-read’ Service95