Forest of Noise : : Poems

Locations
Call Number: 821.92 Ab, Adult Book / Nonfiction / Literary Arts / Plays & Poetry / Abu Toha, Mosab
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Malletts Creek Branch, Westgate Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	821.92 Ab	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Literary Arts / Plays & Poetry / Abu Toha, Mosab	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Literary Arts / Plays & Poetry / Abu Toha, Mosab	4-week checkout	On Shelf

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.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Gaza Tragedy in Free Verse submitted by ekjensen on July 6, 2025, 8:46am An “uncannily clear, direct, and beautifully tuned collection” of poems wrested from wartime Gaza, a crisis in real time by the poet.