We are joined by Mosab Abu Toha, the author of a wonderful new book of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, that came out this year from City Lights Books. Toha’s poems render some of the most moving and telling accounts of how it is to live under blockade and the constant threat and reality of Israeli bombardment. But these are not only “poems that have bombs and corpses, / destroyed houses and shrapnel-covered streets.” They carry also the hope for a future beyond occupation and settler colonial violence, and “imagine a sky only occupied by birds/ and swollen clouds.” They tell of a world where the people of Gaza “love what we have, no matter how little,/ because if we don’t, everything will be gone.” And we are joined in this conversation by American poet and long-standing Palestine solidarity activist, Ammiel Alcalay, whose fine interview with Mosab is included at the end of the volume, and who had much to do with bringing this book into being.
Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, scholar, and librarian who was born in Gaza and has spent his life there. A graduate in English language teaching and literature, he taught English at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) schools in Gaza from 2016 until 2019, and is the founder of the Edward Said Library, Gaza’s first English-language library. Abu Toha is a columnist for Arrowsmith Press, and his writings from Gaza have also appeared in The Nation and Literary Hub. His poems have been published on the Poetry Foundation’s website, in Poetry Magazine, Banipal, Solstice, The Markaz Review, The New Arab, Peripheries, and other journals. They are collected in his new book, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear.
Ammiel Alcalay, (Amiel Al-calay poet), novelist, translator, scholar, and activist, has published numerous collections of poetry, including Scrapmetal (2007), from the warring factions (2002; reissued 2012), neither wit nor gold: (from then) (2011), as well as the novel Islanders (2010) and the scholarly monograph After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (1993). Alcalay’s parents were Sephardic Jews from Belgrade (Serbia), and much of Alcalay’s work engages questions of religious identity, language, and culture, particularly the histories and cultures of the Balkans and the Middle East.
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