when shrapnel / pierced / through / his chest
Poetry | Mosab Abu Toha | Issue 35
Mouth Still Open
Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet from Gaza. His début poetry book, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won an American Book Award, Palestine Book Award, and Walcott Poetry Prize. His essays have been published in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The NYT, and others.
Copyright © 2022 by Mosab Abu Toha. “Mouth Still Open” originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 15, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Mouth Still Open” is published in Send My Love to Anyone with permission of the author.
Mosab wrote about His Perilous Journey Out of Gaza for The New Yorker
“Mouth Still Open” is also included in Toha’s latest book, Forest of Noise.
Forest of Noise by Mosab Abu Toha Penguin Random House, 2024
“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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