Mosab Abu Toha

media release: 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 his house and neighborhood, he and his family fled for their safety.

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 under siege, Forest of Noise is an urgent, extraordinary, and arrestingly whimsical book. Searing and beautiful, it brings us indelible art in a time of war.

In conversation with Samantha Schoville.