Forest of Noise
Poems
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • "A powerful, capacious, and profound" (Ocean Vuong) new collection of poems about life in Gaza by an award-winning Palestinian poet.
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…