April Book Club with Three Avenues: Forest of Noise: Poems

April is National Poetry Month and we'll be reading a simultaneously beautiful and horrifying poetry collection: by Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha. Mosab Abu Toha opens his poetry collection with a dedication to his parents; the famous line from Audre Lorde, "Poetry is not a luxury"; and a poem connecting every child, parent, house, tree, plant, flower, and hole in Gaza to his own body, heart, leg, arm, eye...

Forest of Noise: Poems has a 4.77 ⭐ rating on The StoryGraph; & Jordan gives it 5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Content Warnings

• Graphic: Death, War, Genocide
• Moderate: Torture, Child death, Violence
• Minor: Gore, Islamophobia, Injury/Injury detail

For a full list of graphic warnings, click here.

When: Sunday, April 6

What time: 5-6:30 pm

Where: Beermiscuous

We've got copies of Forest of Noise: Poems in store, so come by anytime. To reserve your copy or have it shipped to you directly, place an order online here.

Having trouble getting the book for any reason? Fill out this form.

"A powerful, capacious, and profound" (Ocean Vuong) new collection of poems about life in Gaza by an award-winning Palestinian poet.

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 and destroyed his house, pulverizing 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; 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 in a barely livable occupation, Forest of Noise invites a wide audience into an experience that defies the imagination--even as it is watched live. Abu Toha's poems introduce readers to his extended family, some of them no longer with us. This is an urgent, extraordinary, and arrestingly whimsical book. Searing and beautiful, it brings us indelible art in a time of terrible suffering.

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