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Book

Forest of noise : poems

Call Number

  • 821 A165 (CEN)

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Edition

First edition.

Publication Information

New York [New York] : Alfred A. Knopf, 2024.

Physical Description

xii, 80 pages ; 22 cm

Summary

"A scholar and a librarian, Mosab Abu Toha is also a major poet whose first collection made him a talent to celebrate. After graduating from a master's program at Syracuse, he returned home to complete his second work. Then the current assault on Gaza began. When 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. Remarkably, amid the chaos, Abu Toha kept writing poems. Uncannily clear, direct, and beautifully tuned, this collection forms one of the most astonishing works of art wrested from wartime. Here are directives for what to do during an air raid and lyrics about the poet's wife, who sings to their children to distract them. Huddled in the dark with his family, 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 livable occupation, 'Forest of noise' invites a wide audience into an experience that defies the imagination--even as people are watching the crisis in real time. Abu Toha's poems introduce readers to his extended family, some of whom are no longer with us. This extraordinary, arrestingly whimsical book brings us indelible art in a time of terrible suffering."--

Notes

"This is a Borzoi book"--Title page verso.

Contents

  • Younger than war
  • OBIT
  • Gaza notebook (2021-2023)
  • My dreams as a child
  • My son throws a blanket over my daughter
  • Grandparents
  • My grandfather's well
  • No art
  • We are looking for Palestine
  • You came into my dream
  • A blank postcard
  • The last kiss
  • Father's myth
  • Palestinian village
  • Thanks (on the eve of my twenty-second birthday)
  • Mothers and mulberry tree
  • My library
  • This is me!
  • Under the rubble
  • Daughter
  • The ball and the bombs
  • Gazan family letters, 2092
  • What a Gazan should do during an Israeli air strike
  • On your knees
  • Two watches
  • See the kites?
  • Request letter
  • What a Gazan mother does during an Israeli night air strike
  • Forest of noise
  • History class
  • 1948
  • A request
  • Love poem
  • To my mother, staying in an UNRWA school shelter in the Jabalia Camp
  • True or false : a test by a Gazan child
  • After Allen Ginsberg
  • After Walt Whitman
  • Mouth still open
  • Ramadan 2024
  • Rescue plane
  • Howl
  • Icarus falling
  • Who has seen the wind?
  • Door on the road
  • Right or left!
  • Before I sleep
  • Sunrise in Palestine
  • The moon
  • For a moment
  • Ash
  • This is not a poem.

Subjects