I began reading this collection immediately after finishing Things You May Have Found Hidden In My Ear & was immediately dismayed at how much more pain there was to be shared in Forest of Noise, published only two years later. Of course, between the two books was October 7th 2023, over 200k Palestinian lives lost, & the near total destruction of the ancestral Indigenous lands of Palestinian Gaza: the author’s homeland.

The way the images evoked in “Under the Rubble” are images I’ve seen on screen with my own eyes as I follow the reporting of Gazans trapped & dying an ocean away. This poem, written by a survivor, by the voice in “This Is Me!” desperately, hopelessly screaming his truth, telling his story to so many deaf ears.

Stylistically I appreciated how raw & resonant these poems were. Their form & structure was so organic & native to the voice of the author & his experiences in a way that makes the reader able to parse the deep emotion & meaning in every word—line—verse—poem… Abu Toha wants his words to reach everyone, every ear, every soul.

My favorite poems were “Palestinian Village”, “This Is Me!”, “Request Letter”, and “After Walt Whitman”.

i would recommend this book to readers who are alive in this world. this book is best read in community. I’m going to recommend a paired reading of both of Abu Toha’s books to my irl poetry bookclub.

"If you live in Gaza, you die several times"

Reading this was a gut punch. It's heavy, heartbreaking, resilient.

Mosab Abu Toha intimately leads us through moments of his life in Gaza. From his grandparent's experience during the Nakba to time spent in refugee camps to the grief of losing family, friends, and home. I was on the verge of tears as I listened to Toha recount the immense grief Palestinians continuously experience. It is incredibly sad, but it also fueled my passion in activism for a Palestine that is free.

I’ve already bought this book for several people. How beautiful and heartbreaking and powerful to read the words of Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, against this painful backdrop of genocide in this place so many people call home. I’m endlessly grateful that he shared his spirit and homeland with us and that I got the chance to read this thanks to the publisher and NetGalley. This is a must-read as far as I’m concerned. It had me in tears, in anger, in hope, in awe.

Forest of Noise is an excellent collection of poems that paint an important and visceral picture of the effects of war on Gaza and the lives of Palestinians. It is humanizing, thought provoking, and helps readers better understand the day to day impact of the war. Poetry such as this offers a bite sized look at the situation which might be a good starting place for some readers, while still packing a punch with its strong impact upon readers. I found I needed to pause and digest between poems more than I typically do for this collection, but that only speaks to the quality of the collection that it justified such pauses, and had enough food for thought to sustain my reflections between poems. Overall, these poems are impactful and important; I will definitely be recommending them to others.

A stunning and timely poetry collection. I am so glad Toha put this collection into the world. Each piece is captivating, weaving the reader through the joy and heartbreak his family - and the people of Gaza - are steeped in.

Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha was born in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. He was already a prize-winning author when the current war began, and he found himself forced to evacuate their home with his wife and their two young children. At one point he revisited their old home to get some of the books he had painstakingly collected and formed into a community library named after Edward Said. Nothing remained but rubble.

Writing in the midst of chaos, homes destroyed and friends and family killed, Abu Toha has nonetheless managed to create something of beauty that will last. By writing particulars of his family and his memories, he brings the horrors of war home and pays homage to the strength of family and the power of memory.

For example in the poem My Son Throws a Blanket over My Daughter, he writes: “My four-year-old daughter, Yaffa,/weaing the pink dress given to her by a friend,/hears a bomb explode. She gasps,/covers her mouth with her dress’s ruffles./Yazzan, her five-and-a-half-year-old brother,/ grabs a blanket warmed by his sleepy body./You can hide now, he assures her.”

Whether we are reading of his grandfather’s orange trees in Jaffa or the amnesia of stones, which “forget they were in a wall in a bedroom or a kitchen or a bathroom,” Abu Toha’s poems capture quotidian life in a war zone as lived over generations, bringing the reader into the experience. Forest of Noise is devastating and beautiful, timely and timeless, and highlights our shared humanity. Highly recommended!

This is my first book I’ve read by Mosab Abu Toha. I have been following Mosab’s posts on instagram throughout the past year. This is a beautiful poetry collection. I cried at some of these poems and my heart breaks knowing the conditions in which Mosab wrote this book in and continues to write in. I want to get a copy of this book for my home library to revisit in the future.

I took a course in college entitled: Man's Inhumanity to Man, which dealt with the literature of genocide. This collection of powerful poetry could easily fit within that course syllabus. It almost feels like trivializing the topic to leave a review, but I will say that Toha's words are haunting.

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for sharing this book with me.

5/5 ☆

If someone asks me to describe this poetry collection in two words, I would call it a survivor’s testimony.

This is the kind of book that would shake you with the realisation that while your part of the world might be comfortable to live in, there are people in other parts of it that are constantly surviving — the colonisation, the dehumanisation, their occupation. Every single poem was painful to read, because it’s impossible to read them without remembering that this is a harrowing reality for millions of people in Gaza. In Palestine.

This is a book that should be on everyone’s shelves.

A powerful voice out of Palestine, Mosab Abu Toha details the realities of living in an occupied Gaza in stark and staggering language. While the horrors of genocide are detailed in ways a reader far removed from war might begin to imagine (descriptions of bombs, violence, destruction), it is perhaps the poetic vignettes of day-to-day life that are more haunting: the description of a photo of a grandfather beneath the rubble of a home, two children sleeping side by side, razed cemeteries. In this way, the author reminds us of the individual lives, the families, the homes destroyed by genocide. While poetry is often so abstract, Mosab Abu Toha could not be more clear.

Thank you to NetGalley for my advanced reader copy.

Beautifully written and urgently moving this poetry collection is a time capsule of the current occupation of Gaza. It is equal parts lovely and horrible in it's portrayal of the raw pain and suffering that is still playing out everyday. Forest of Noise is a visceral reminder of the human toll of this genocide and the everyday people losing everything. I would recommend this to everyone, especially those having a hard time grasping the individual suffering taking place.

If you like poetry that reads like music, books that are raw, honest, pull no punches and carry equal amounts of love, Forest of Noise is the book for you. Not to mention, it's always important to read books by Palestinian people but more so now.

Note: The audiobook is also an incredible experience.

There have been recent debates on platforms like TikTok about “leaving politics out of literature,” but that is impossible, especially with a medium like poetry, which is a reflection of the times. Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet from the Gaza, and this collection gives us a glimpse into his lived experiences. These poems are filled with an aching grief, a loneliness, a loss of sense of self when you’re from somewhere but it’s also a place of fear and war-torn ruins. Maybe my favorite stanza is: “Even your shadow will abandon you / when there is no light. / So just keep things that require only you: / the book of poems that only you can decipher, / the blank map of a country / whose cities and villages only you can recognize.”

Mosab Abu Toha’s Forest of Noise is a searing poetry collection that lays bare the brutal realities of life in Gaza. With clear, unflinching language, Toha documents the scarcity, displacement, and grief endured by generations of Palestinians under Israeli occupation and bombardment, while capturing the humanity that persists amidst the horrors. The poetry in this collection resonates as vital testimony to an ongoing crisis. Both heartbreaking and essential, this collection forces readers to confront the suffering and resilience of a people often ignored. We cannot afford to look away. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

A must read book!!! What Mosab Abu Toha accomplishes in this book is worth all readers considering. The world always needs poets, and we, especially need Mosab Abu Toha. If you only read one book published in 2024, let it be this book.

Abu Toha's poems in this collection are strong, moving, and confronting especially in this moment. Worth a read for all lof us.

I've been struggling to review this collection of poems. Abu Toha knows a grief I'll only ever (hopefully) know peripherally. His words are searing. He grabs you by the shoulders, shakes you, and demands you look at the truth of what's happening (and has been happening) in Palestine. I'm forever grateful for his art.

This is a heartbreaking and powerful collection that really brings to life the struggles of living in Gaza. Through his raw and emotional poems, Mosab Abu Toha shows both the pain of constant violence and the small moments of love and resilience, making it a really important read that hits hard.

The marrow of Mosab Abu Toha’s experiences, especially since the Israeli-Hamas War began in October of 2023, spills throughout every poem and phrase in “Forest of Noise: Poems” (Alfred A. Knopf, 2024).

Palestinian poet and founder of the Edward Said Library Abu Toha’s first poetry collection, “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear” (2022), won the Palestinian Book Award and the American Book Award. With “Forest of Noise,” there is no divide between his poetry and struggles on the frontlines with his family in Gaza. The stark and everlasting generational and environmental horrors are all laid bare on the page.

“My Son Throws a Blanket Over My Daughter: Gaza, May 2021,” Abu Toha takes us on a nighttime journey with his family through bombings in Gaza.  Away from the windows.  Huddled together for shelter and support.  Terror juxtaposes with uncertain happiness for any time they remain safe.  But the poem title says it all. It’s his five-and-a-half-year-old son who now knows if a bomb explodes and scares his younger sister enough; he should cover her with a blanket for a semblance of temporary safety.

Throughout Abu Toha's raging and liminal forest of explosive and echoing noises, the impact of war on our loved ones, not just our children but our aging parents, is in the foreground. The detriment to the literary arts and our conceptualization of home (and a homeland) also simmers beneath the surface of this poignant, must-read poetry book.

Thank you to Mosab Abu Toha, Alfred A. Knopf, and NetGalley for the eARC.

"But of all things,
losing the only photo of my grandfather
under the rubble of my house
was a real disaster.'

This is such a heartbreaking and haunting collection of poems about life in Gaza; each one tears the heart out a little bit more. I feel so grateful to the author for sharing his feelings and experiences; I think I ended up highlighting almost every page because it was all so powerful. Highly recommend this one.

Thank you so much to Knopf and Netgalley for this book.