Forest of Noise

‘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

‘This new collection from a renowned Palestinian poet offers 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, author of A Flat Place, in Guardian

‘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

‘His poems resonate with undeniable immediacy upon a first reading and continue ringing more and more urgently with every subsequent reading. Abu Toha writes with a brilliance that makes anyone who encounters these astonishing poems both witness and kin’ Terrance Hayes, author of So To Speak

‘Heartbreaking, evocative, transformative poetry of witness to the horror of warfare … This is powerful, impactful poetry, a book you won’t soon forget’ llya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

‘Astonishing … Mosab Abu Toha is the essential poet embodying the humanity of Gaza, the precious hopes and dreams of all humans, the searing collective cries of children, the indelible honest conscience, the heart and soul' Naomi Shihab Nye, author of The Tiny Journalist

‘Mosab Abu Toha … uses language to fight against those who would ignore his people’s plight. He does this even though, as he tells us in the poem No Art, he has personally “lost a city to darkness, and a language to fear”’ Jhalak Review