'Powerful capacious and profound' OCEAN VUONG 'A book you won't soon forget' ILYA KAMINSKY
'Astonishing' TERRANCE HAYES LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE FROM THE WINNER OF THE
2025 PULITZER PRIZE FOR COMMENTARY A deeply powerful collection of poems about life in Gaza by
acclaimed 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 poet's wife singing to his children to distract them.
Huddled in the dark Abu Toha remembers his grandfather's oranges and his daughter's 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.
'A glimpse into life in a besieged Gaza and what it's 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 'The poems in Mosab Abu Toha's Forest of Noise are urgent prayerful howls in the
bleakest of nights' ADA LIMÓN 'Essential ... uses language to fight against those who would
ignore his people's plight' JHALAK REVIEW
