Forest of Noise // Knopf Doubleday, 2024

This collection of poetry is a graveyard. The poems are graves, “not beneath the soil of Homeland, but above a flat, light white rag of paper” (pg. 77). This metaphor is established at the end of the collection, once the graves have been gone through.

The poems are about war, about missing people and missing body parts. They are about the loss of story, and of voices. The forest is the Palestinian people and the noise is that of the apartheid—the ongoing genocide.

I am learning, more and more, that every story coming out of the genocide is unique and worth listening to. This book is one family’s experience condensed through the lines of the Mosab Abu Toha’s poetry. It is one more voice that has survived for now.

From the lens of poetry, what I learned from this collection was something about how poems can be anything—if they need to be grave markers, they can be; if they need to be tombs, or eulogies, or time capsules, or pleas for help, they can be.

Forest of Noise—Read this book if you need a place to hold your trauma.