Mosab Abu Toha Discusses Forest of Noise with Isabella Hammad
Billed as "powerful, capacious, and profound" (Ocean Vuong), the award-winning poet Mosab Abu Toha discusses his new book, Forest of Noise—with novelist Isabella Hammad. At thirty years old, Mosab Abu Toha was a well-known poet when he and his family fled the conflict unleashed on October 7, 2023. Amid the chaos, Abu Toha kept writing poems. Uncannily clear, direct, and beautifully tuned, they form one of the most astonishing works of art wrested from wartime.
This highly anticipated collection of poems, writes current U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón, are "are urgent, prayerful howls in the bleakest of nights. Necessary, and wrought out of both terror and truth, these poems sing and weep in a rough and haunting harmony. Abu Toha’s work begs the reader to pay close attention as each poetic line is, at its heart, a lifeline to survival.”
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Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, short-story writer, and essayist from Gaza. His first collection of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and won the Palestine Book Award, the American Book Award, and the Walcott Poetry Prize. Abu Toha is also the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza, which he hopes to rebuild. He recently won an Overseas Press Club Award for his “Letter from Gaza” columns for The New Yorker.
Isabella Hammad was born in London, and she is the author of The Parisian and Enter Ghost. She was awarded the 2018 Plimpton Prize for Fiction and a 2019 O. Henry Prize. The Parisian won a Palestine Book Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Betty Trask Award from the Society of Authors in the UK. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree and named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. She has received literary fellowships from MacDowell, the Cullman Center, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the Columbia University Institute for Ideas and Imagination. Photo credit Kathy Coulter
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