Forest of Noise
Poems
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • "A powerful, capacious, and profound" (Ocean Vuong) new collection of poems about life in Gaza by an acclaimed Palestinian poet and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer
You are alive
for a moment
when living people
run after you.
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 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The blistering and mournful second collection from Abu Toha (Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear) recounts the violence of the Israeli occupation that both he and past generations of his family have experienced in Gaza. In the book's epigraph, he declares his unbreakable connection to his homeland: "Every child in Gaza is me./ Every mother and father are me./ Every house is my heart./ Every tree is my leg." Abu Toha offers affecting firsthand accounts of life in a refugee camp ("a mother collects her daughter's/ flesh in a piggy bank") and of individuals listening to nearby explosions, powerless to protect themselves or their children. Even the wound over the decade-old loss of his brother is made newly fresh: "Now it's 2024 and the cemetery you were buried in was razed by/ Israeli bulldozers and tanks. How can I find you now?" Grief is palpable and seemingly endless, striking to the very core of the poet's identity: "I've personally lost three friends to war,/ a city to darkness, and a language to fear." Abu Toha eloquently captures the brutality and urgency of the present moment.
