A Haunting Portrait of War through the Eyes of Palestinian Poets in "Forest of Noise"

Forest of Noise, a poetry collection by Mosab Abu Toha, was published by Knopf on October 15, 2024.

Mosab Abu Toha held his hands six inches apart, illustrating the flattening of his home in Gaza on Oct. 28, 2023.

“I have a video of my mother with my brother, digging through the rubble in the hope of finding some food,” he shared. “The only thing they could find were books.”

Two branches of the Edward Said Public Library, which Abu Toha founded, were also destroyed in airstrikes, reducing a collection of around 6,000 English-language titles to debris. Each shipment had taken eight weeks to arrive, processed through Israel.

“People used to come borrow books,” said Abu Toha, who fled Gaza in 2023 after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel triggered a sustained retaliatory blitz. “I used to give lessons in the library. There was a book club.”

Now in Syracuse, N.Y., Abu Toha follows the war from afar. “I personally lost about 31 members of my extended family,” he said. “The rubble of my house, the rubble of the school where I used to teach, is on my shoulder.”

When that burden becomes too heavy, Abu Toha channels it into poetry.

Many of those poems comprise Forest of Noise, his latest collection, published last month. Alongside “No One Will Know You Tomorrow” by Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish, set for release on Nov. 26, the works offer an unflinching view of war’s repercussions: fear, dread, devastation, and exile.

In “Thanks (on the Eve of My Twenty-Second Birthday),” Abu Toha portrays a family fleeing during an airstrike: “Mother forgot the cake in the oven, the bomb smoke mixed with the burnt chocolate and strawberry.”

“The Last Kiss” depicts a soldier heading to battle — a sandwich in his backpack, his wife’s lipstick smudged on his ear, the list of baby names they’d brainstormed.

“For me, the story of the loss is important,” Abu Toha reflected. “But equally important is what was happening before everything was lost.”

The markers of normal life remain, veiled by ash.

Since publication, Forest of Noise has sold 32,500 copies — a remarkable feat for a poetry collection. Abu Toha believes his poems provide deeper insight than news reports by conveying emotions. “Because I am not a camera,” he explained.

His poetry has visceral immediacy. He often posts verses to Instagram or X, transmitting the horrors of war to thousands almost in real time. “I can publish it sooner than I can publish a novel or short story,” Abu Toha said. “It doesn’t wait. The urgency of the moment is written.”

Abu Toha and Darwish continue a long tradition of wartime poetry. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Ukrainian poets have spurred a literary revival. The documentary “After: Poetry Destroys Silence” examines poetic responses to the Holocaust, underscoring the form’s power in processing trauma.

Edward Hirsch, author of “100 Poems to Break Your Heart” and the elegiac “Gabriel,” emphasizes poetry’s unique capacity. “Poetry gives you information that you can’t find elsewhere,” he noted. “It speaks to our emotional lives. It dramatizes experience from the inside.”

Palestinian-American poets Fady Joudah and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha were National Book Award finalists; Tuffaha won on Nov. 20. In her acceptance speech, she recalled her father’s stories of a homeland he could no longer inhabit. “That story has carried me through my entire life — has driven me, has motivated me.”

Their works, like those of Abu Toha and Darwish, blend witness, resistance, longing, and fury. “Tremendous grief renders you mute,” Hirsch said. “Finding your way from muteness to language brings you back into the human community.”

Darwish, writing daily from Jerusalem, also grapples with this weight. “Sometimes I’m exhausted. I have nothing. I write one line and that’s it.”

Since Oct. 7, Abu Toha has stopped writing in Arabic, directing his words to the global audience. Darwish’s forthcoming collection, “No One Will Know You Tomorrow,” translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, spans a decade of work exploring displacement and erasure.

“I have no country to return to and no country to be banished from,” Darwish writes in “We Never Stop.”

In “Hardly Breathe,” he laments, “Didn’t I have a history? ... How did you take my share of loss and leave abandonment in its stead, a planet without a ribcage?”

Abu-Zeid describes Darwish’s collection as “a relentless bearing witness.”

Darwish’s role as culture editor at The New Arab is symbolic: in Arabic, “editor” also means “liberator.”

“When I was a kid, my dream was to liberate Palestine,” Darwish said. “Now, I’m liberating the words of fellow authors. The irony of how dreams can become smaller with time.”

Poetry remains a spiritual anchor. Darwish keeps a notebook close, even as he sleeps. Lately, he’s taken to photographing its pages — just in case.

“What kind of creatures would we become without poetry?” he mused. “It’s the oldest art we practice.”