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Forest of Noise

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 An urgent and profound collection of journalistic poetry about life in Gaza.

 

In Forest of Noise, Mosab Abu Toha bears witness to the ongoing crisis in Gaza with unwavering clarity and poetic force. Through vivid, personal accounts—his family home in flames, his detainment by the IDF, the deaths of children, the grip of starvation, and the destruction of the Edward Said Library he founded—Abu Toha calls not only for recognition, but for responsibility. His poems are at once elegy and outcry, resisting erasure and demanding Western awareness of a violence too often ignored.

Headshot of Mosab Abu Toha

Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, short-story writer, and Pulitzer Prize-winning 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. His second collection, Forest of Noise, was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He recently won an Overseas Press Club Award for his “Letter from Gaza” columns for The New Yorker. Abu Toha is also the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza, which he hopes to rebuild.

Because poetry this urgent and unflinching refuses to be ignored.

Author at Ģtv

Join us in person or on Thursday, Sept. 18, for Mosab Abu Toha’s reading and book-signing. The event will take place at 4:30 EST in Love Auditorium. Refreshments available.

Beyond the Book

  • asks, “When words fail, what is the use in being poetical?”—a question posed in praise of Toha’s urgency and clarity.
  • Malika Bilal from The Take and Mosab Abu Toha talk about Toha’s relationship with language and the verbiage of genocide in .
  • See which this year.

This is not a poem. 
This is a grave, not
beneath the soil of Homeland, 
But above a flat, light white
rag of paper.” 

This Is Not a Poem