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.
FINALIST
| 2025 The Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize
MOSAB ABU TOHA is a Palestinian poet, shortstory writer, and essayist from Gaza. His first collectionof poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and won a Palestine Book Award, an American Book Award, and the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. Abu Toha is also the founder ofthe Edward Said Library in Gaza, which he hopes to rebuild. He recently won an Overseas Press ClubAward and a Pulitzer Prize in Commentary for hisessays on Gaza in The New Yorker.
View titles by Mosab Abu Toha
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.
Awards
FINALIST
| 2025 The Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize
MOSAB ABU TOHA is a Palestinian poet, shortstory writer, and essayist from Gaza. His first collectionof poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and won a Palestine Book Award, an American Book Award, and the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. Abu Toha is also the founder ofthe Edward Said Library in Gaza, which he hopes to rebuild. He recently won an Overseas Press ClubAward and a Pulitzer Prize in Commentary for hisessays on Gaza in The New Yorker.
View titles by Mosab Abu Toha
