Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear – Mosab Abu Toha
Author: Mosab Abu Toha
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Print Length: 144 pages
Genre: Poetry Book
Area: Gaza, Palestine / Israel
People: Palestinian / Falastini
Topic: Children & Childhood, Poetics, Poetry, The Notion of Home, War
In this poetry debut Mosab Abu Toha writes about his life under siege in Gaza, first as a child, and then as a young father. A survivor of four brutal military attacks, he bears witness to a grinding cycle of destruction and assault, and yet, his poetry is inspired by a profound humanity.
These poems emerge directly from the experience of growing up and living in constant lockdown, and often under direct attack. Like Gaza itself, they are filled with rubble and the ever-present menace of surveillance drones policing a people unwelcome in their own land, and they are also suffused with the smell of tea, roses in bloom, and the view of the sea at sunset. Children are born, families continue traditions, students attend university, and libraries rise from the ruins as Palestinians go on about their lives, creating beauty and finding new ways to survive. Accompanied by an in-depth interview (conducted by Ammiel Alcalay) in which Abu Toha discusses life in Gaza, his family origins, and how he came to poetry.
Table of Contents
Palestine A-Z
Leaving Childhood Behind
What Is Home?
My Grandfather Was a Terrorist
On a Starless Night
Palestinian Painter
my grandfather and father
Palestinian Streets
In the War: you and houses
Searching for a New Exit
Flying Poem
Sobbing Without Sound
Discoveries
Hard Exercise
Olympic Hopscotch Leap
Death Before Birth (DBB)
Rubble Salary
Cold Sweat
Tears
Deserted Boat, Dreaming
The Wall and the Clock
My City After What Happened Some Time Ago
Interlude
We Love What We Have
A Litany for “One Land”
We Deserve a Better Death
Everyday Meals During Wars
US and THEM
silence of water
On Gaza Seashore
Sharpnel Looking for Laughter
A Voice from Beneath
Seven Fingers
Gone With the Gunpowder
Palestinian Sonnet
Ibrahim Abu Lughod and Brother in Yaffa
Desert and Exile
To Mahmoud Darwish
To Ghassan Kanafani
Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, and Theodor Adorno in Gaza
Displaced
To Ibrahim Kilani
The Wounds
To My Visa Interviewer
Notebooks
A Boy and His Telescope
Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear
Mosab
Memorize Your Dream
Forever Homeless
A Rose Shoulders Up
Interview with the Author
Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, short story writer, and essayist from Gaza. Abu Toha is the author of Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza (2022, City Lights), which won a 2022 Palestine Book Award. Abu Toha is the founder of the Edward Said Library, and from 2019 to 2020, he was a visiting poet and librarian-in-residence at Harvard University.
Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/people/mosab-toha
More from Mosab Abu Toha in this library, click here.