Forest of Noise

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Powerful, capacious and profound OCEAN VUONG

A book you wont soon forget ILYA KAMINSKY

Astonishing TERRANCE HAYES

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE

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 poets wife, singing to his children to distract them. Huddled in the dark, Abu Toha remembers his grandfathers oranges and his daughters 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

Reviews

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 its 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 Limn, 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 wont 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 peoples 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 Tohas 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

Author Bio

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.