In one of Mosab Abu Toha's poems, "Sunrise in Palestine," clouds of smoke of bombs have covered Gaza's sky to such an extent that the sunlight is "smuggled [by fighters] through tunnels beneath [their] houses." This image is one of the most powerful metaphors of this collection because it conveys its central theme; resistance through suffering, where resistance is not just an act of survival, but a praxis of unsettling the colonial and necropolitical undertones of oppression, dehumanization, and erasure by narrating beauty, by "smuggling the sunlight."

Forest of Noise is a collection by Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, exploring life in Gaza before and after October 7th 2023. There are poems addressed to family members, poems about tiny moments, and poems twisting poetic styles and ideas into new forms that can express the daily horrors of life in Gaza. Some standout poems for me were 'Younger than War', 'What a Gazan Should Do During an Israeli Air Strike' and 'After Allen Ginsberg'. It seems obvious to call the collection 'powerful', but it is hard not to, with the poems documenting suffering but also humanity in ways that most readers will not be able to imagine. Forest of Noise confronts us with what it means to document genocide using poetry, with whimsy and beauty alongside atrocity.