Forest of Noise: Poems (Hardcover)

Regular price £18.00

 

by Mosab Abu Toha

Description

"A powerful, capacious, and profound" (Ocean Vuong) new collection of poems about life in Gaza by an award-winning Palestinian poet
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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 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.
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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.
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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.
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About the Author

Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, scholar, and librarian who was born in Gaza and has spent his life there. He is the founder of the Edward Said Library, Gaza's first English-language library. Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, his debut book of poems, won an American Book Award, a 2022 Palestine Book Award and was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, as well as the 2022 Walcott Poetry Prize. In 2019-2020, Abu Toha was a Visiting Poet in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Abu Toha is a columnist for Arrowsmith Press, and his writings from Gaza have also appeared in The Nation and Literary Hub. His poems have been published in Poetry, The Nation, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, and the New York Review of Books, among others.

Product Details

Category: Palestine Studies, Poetry

Language: English

Format/Binding: Hardcover

Book Condition: New

ISBN-10: 0593803973

ISBN-13: 978-0593803974

Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group

Date Published: October 15, 2024

Pages: 96

Terms of Sale

All book sales are final. No returns or exchanges.

Purchaser will receive a new book that has never been read.

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