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.
