
Forest of Noise
Poems
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Narrated by:
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Mosab Abu Toha
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By:
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Mosab Abu Toha
About this listen
"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 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 listeners 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.
©2024 Mosab Abu Toha (P)2024 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
A New York Times Book Notable Book • A The New Yorker Best Book & Essential Read of 2024 • A Library Journal Best Book of Poetry • An Electric Lit Top Five Poetry Collection of 2024
"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 and On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
"The poems in Mosab Abu Toha's Forest of Noise are urgent, prayerful howls in the bleakest of nights. Necessary, and wrought out of both terror and truth, these poems sing and weep in a rough and haunting harmony. Abu Toha's work begs the reader to pay close attention as each poetic line is, at its heart, a lifeline to survival."—Ada Limón, US Poet Laureate, author of The Hurting Kind
"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 Guardian
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Story
The Coin’s narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman with impeccable style and meticulous hygiene. And yet the ideal self, the ideal life, remains just out of reach: her inheritance is inaccessible, her homeland exists only in her memory, and her attempt to thrive in America seems doomed from the start. In New York, she strives to put down roots. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys, where her eccentric methods cross boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler, and the two participate in an intercontinental scheme reselling Birkin bags.
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Interview of author on podcast piqued interest
- By amybarnard on 08-03-24
By: Yasmin Zaher
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Gaza Writes Back
- Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine
- By: Refaat Alareer
- Narrated by: Amin El Gamal, Lameece Issaq
- Length: 3 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine, edited by Refaat Alareer, is a compelling collection of short stories from 15 young writers in Gaza, members of a generation that has suffered immensely under Israel's siege and blockade. Their experiences, especially during and following Israel's 2008-2009 offensive known as Operation Cast Lead, have fundamentally impacted their lives and their writing.
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Powerful. Sad and beautiful at the same time.
- By Gheed M. Murtadi on 05-02-24
By: Refaat Alareer
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LatinoLand
- A Portrait of America's Largest and Least Understood Minority
- By: Marie Arana
- Narrated by: Cynthia Farrell
- Length: 18 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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LatinoLand is an exceptional, all-encompassing overview of Hispanic America based on personal interviews, deep research, and Marie Arana’s life experience as a Latina. At present, Latinos comprise twenty percent of the US population, a number that is growing. By 2050, census reports project that one in every three Americans will claim Latino heritage.
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If you’re searching for the truth, this may not be your resource. Had children
- By Melissa L. Cook on 09-17-24
By: Marie Arana
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Small Rain
- A Novel
- By: Garth Greenwell
- Narrated by: Garth Greenwell
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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A poet's life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind. This is a searching, sweeping novel set at the furthest edges of human experience, where the forces that give life value—art, memory, poetry, music, care—are thrown into sharp relief.
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A Masterpiece
- By Herluf Kanstrup on 09-22-24
By: Garth Greenwell
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Beautiful Days
- Stories
- By: Zach Williams
- Narrated by: Dan Bittner
- Length: 6 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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A couple awakens in a home in the woods to find themselves rapidly aging as their toddler remains unchanged. A work-worn employee navigates conspiracy theories and the threat of violence in an abandoned office. A tour guide leads a troublesome group to an ancient structure, apparently nonhuman in origin, discovering along the way that the most mysterious creatures of all are right beside him.
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Needs more edge
- By Jeffrey A Horler on 12-15-24
By: Zach Williams
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Modern Poetry
- Poems
- By: Diane Seuss
- Narrated by: Diane Seuss
- Length: 2 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Diane Seuss's signature voice—audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its attitude—has become one of the most original in contemporary poetry. Her latest collection takes its title, Modern Poetry, from the first textbook Seuss encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college, as an enrapt but ill-equipped student, one who felt poetry was beyond her reach. Many of the poems make use of the forms and terms of musical and poetic craft and contend with the works of writers overrepresented in textbooks and anthologies and those often underrepresented.
By: Diane Seuss
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The Coin
- A Novel
- By: Yasmin Zaher
- Narrated by: Sarah Agha
- Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The Coin’s narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman with impeccable style and meticulous hygiene. And yet the ideal self, the ideal life, remains just out of reach: her inheritance is inaccessible, her homeland exists only in her memory, and her attempt to thrive in America seems doomed from the start. In New York, she strives to put down roots. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys, where her eccentric methods cross boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler, and the two participate in an intercontinental scheme reselling Birkin bags.
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Interview of author on podcast piqued interest
- By amybarnard on 08-03-24
By: Yasmin Zaher
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The Freaks Came Out to Write
- The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture
- By: Tricia Romano
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller, Jo Anna Perrin
- Length: 16 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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You either were there or you wanted to be. A defining New York City institution co-founded by Norman Mailer, The Village Voice was the first newspaper to cover hip-hop, the avant-garde art scene, and Off-Broadway with gravitas. It reported on the AIDS crisis with urgency and seriousness when other papers dismissed it as a gay disease. In 1979, the Voice’s Wayne Barrett uncovered Donald Trump as a corrupt con artist before anyone else was paying attention.
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Excellent content and structure, but …
- By richard s. burker on 03-16-24
By: Tricia Romano
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The Empusium
- A Health Resort Horror Story
- By: Olga Tokarczuk
- Narrated by: Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Natasha Soudek
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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September 1913. A young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and debate the great issues of the day: Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding hills. Someone—or something—seems to be watching, attempting to infiltrate this cloistered world.
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Never ending Misogyny
- By Nina O on 10-11-24
By: Olga Tokarczuk
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Soldier Sailor
- A Novel
- By: Claire Kilroy
- Narrated by: Simone Collins
- Length: 6 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Claire Kilroy takes listeners deep inside the early days of motherhood. Exploring the clash of fierce love with a seismic shift in identity, Kilroy conjures the raw, tumultuous emotions of a new mother, as her marriage strains and she struggles with questions of equality, autonomy, and creativity.
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An emotional roller coaster that all moms can relate to
- By shoegal20 on 08-19-24
By: Claire Kilroy
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The Burning Earth
- A History
- By: Sunil Amrith
- Narrated by: Esh Alladi
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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The imperial, globe-spanning pursuit of profit, joined with new forms of energy and new possibilities of freedom from hunger and discomfort, freedom to move and explore, has brought change to every inch of the Earth. Amrith relates in gorgeous prose, and on the largest canvas, a mind-altering epic in which humanity might find the collective wisdom to save itself.
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Environmental grieving
- By Anonymous User on 02-15-25
By: Sunil Amrith
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Health and Safety
- A Breakdown
- By: Emily Witt
- Narrated by: Emily Witt
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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In the summer of 2016, a divisive presidential election was underway, and a new breed of right-wing rage was on the rise. Emily Witt, who would soon publish her first book on sex in the digital age, had recently quit antidepressants for a more expansive world of psychedelic experimentation. From her apartment in Brooklyn, she began to catch glimpses of the clandestine nightlife scene thrumming around her.
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Bored voice
- By Amazon Customer on 12-20-24
By: Emily Witt
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Smoke Kings
- A Novel
- By: Jahmal Mayfield
- Narrated by: Terrence Kidd
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Smoke Kings is a powerful and propulsive novel with a diverse and unforgettable cast of characters. Like Steph Cha's Your House Will Pay it explores decades of racial tensions through a fictional landscape where the line between justice and revenge is blurred.
By: Jahmal Mayfield
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Young Mungo
- By: Douglas Stuart
- Narrated by: Chris Reilly
- Length: 13 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Born under different stars—Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic—they should be sworn enemies if they’re to be seen as men at all. Their environment is a hyper-masculine and sectarian one, for gangs of young men and the violence they might dole out dominate the Glaswegian estate where they live. And yet against all odds Mungo and James become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds.
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Suffering Sappho!
- By Richard Stewart on 04-12-22
By: Douglas Stuart
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Burdened
- Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis
- By: Ryann Liebenthal
- Narrated by: Eileen Stevens
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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College costs more today than ever and is worth less. Tuition at public colleges has more than tripled in the past 50 years. Over the same period student debt has grown from virtually nothing to more than $1.7 trillion, second only to home mortgages. Skyrocketing student-loan burdens are leading an entire generation to put off the traditional milestones of adulthood: buying homes, getting married, starting families, and saving for retirement.
By: Ryann Liebenthal
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Time Is a Mother
- By: Ocean Vuong
- Narrated by: Ocean Vuong
- Length: 1 hr and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of personal and social loss, embodying the paradox of sitting in grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with the meaning of family and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, these poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.
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solomn
- By Camille on 09-05-24
By: Ocean Vuong
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The Anthropologists
- By: Aysegül Savas
- Narrated by: Kathryn Aboya
- Length: 4 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? What rituals will structure their days? Whom can they consider family? As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, gathers footage from the neighborhood like an anthropologist observing local customs. “Forget about daily life,” chides her grandmother on the phone. “We named you for a whole continent and you’re filming a park.”
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Can't say it's good
- By Moraz on 12-22-24
By: Aysegül Savas
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My Friends
- A Novel
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 13 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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One evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio, about a man being eaten alive by a cat, and has the sense that his life has been changed forever. Obsessed by the power of those words—and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zowa—Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh. There, thrust into an open society that is miles away from the world he knew in Libya, Khaled begins to change.
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Beautifully written
- By Anonymous User on 06-24-24
By: Hisham Matar
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The Message
- By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Narrated by: Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Length: 5 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic “Politics and the English Language,” but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities. In the first of the book’s three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind.
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Bias
- By Dana on 10-13-24
By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
What listeners say about Forest of Noise
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- N.K.
- 10-25-24
Beautiful, powerful, and devastating
Mosab Abu Toha is the voice of his people. These are extraordinary poems and an excellent performance. Highly recommended.
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