Forest of Noise

‘Powerful, capacious and profound’ — OCEAN VUONG

‘A book you won’t soon forget’ — ILYA KAMINSKY

‘Astonishing’ — TERRANCE HAYES

Longlisted for the 2025 Dylan Thomas Prize

From the winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary

A deeply powerful collection of poems about life in Gaza by acclaimed Palestinian poet, Mosab Abu Toha.

Barely 30 years old, Mosab Abu Toha was already a well-known poet when the current assault on Gaza began. After the Israeli army bombed his house, pulverising 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 and lyrics about the poet’s wife, singing to his children to distract them. Huddled in the dark, Abu Toha remembers his grandfather’s oranges and his daughter’s joy in eating them. Here are poems to introduce readers to his extended family, some of them no longer with us.

Moving between glimpses of life in relative peacetime and absurdist poems about surviving in a barely liveable occupation, Forest of Noise invites a wide audience into an experience that defies the imagination — even as it is watched live. This is an extraordinary and arrestingly whimsical book, that brings us indelible art in a time of terrible suffering.

‘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

‘The poems in Mosab Abu Toha's Forest of Noise are urgent, prayerful howls in the bleakest of nights’ — ADA LIMÓN

‘Essential … uses language to fight against those who would ignore his people’s plight’ — JHALAK REVIEW