Forest of Noise

‘Powerful, capacious and profound’ OCEAN VUONG‘A book you won’t soonforget’ ILYA KAMINSKY‘Astonishing’ TERRANCE HAYESA deeply powerful collection of poems about life in Gaza by award-winning Palestinian poet, Mosab Abu Toha.Barely 30 years old, Mosab Abu Toha was already a well-known poet when the current siege of Gaza began. After the Israeli army bombed his house and destroyed 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; 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 and his daughter’s joy in eating them.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. 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, it brings us indelible art in a time of terrible suffering.‘Necessary, and wrought out of both terror and truth, these poems sing and weep in a rough and haunting harmony’ ADA LIMÓN, author of The Hurting Kind‘Astonishing … His elemental poems dissolve the empty rhetoric and posturing with simple, striking truth’ NAOMI SHIHAB NYE, author of The Tiny Journalist