
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
Beautiful, powerful, and devastating
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