These poems emerge directly from the experience of growing up and living one’s entire life in Gaza, making a life for one’s family and raising a family in constant lockdown, and often under direct attack. In his debut, conceived during the Israeli bombing campaign of May 2021, Mosab Abu Toha writes about life under siege, first as a child, then as a young father. A survivor of four brutal military attacks, he bears witness to a grinding cycle of destruction and assault, yet his poetry is inspired by a profoundly universal humanity.

In direct, vivid language, Abu Toha tells of being wounded by shrapnel at the age of 16 and, a few years later, watching his home and his university get hit by IDF warplanes in a bombing campaign that killed two of his closest friends. These poems are filled with rubble and the ever-present menace of surveillance drones policing a people unwelcome in their own land. They are suffused with the smell of tea, roses in bloom, and a 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 creating beauty and finding new ways to survive.

Purchase Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear here. All proceeds go to Mohammed’s family.

"Takes the reader on a turbulent journey of emotion with a series of gradual realizations where Palestinians come to terms with identity, memory and loss."
-The New Arab

"Abu Toha takes readers on a journey, from the moment he began writing poetry in the midst of an Israeli offensive on Gaza in 2014. His collection of poems feature stories about poverty in Gaza, life under the siege, unemployment, and tales of bombs, on almost every page. This of course is no coincidence, as Abu Toha’s poetry was born in the midst of the 2014 war."
-Mondoweiss

"Mosab Abu Toha is an astonishingly gifted young poet from Gaza, almost a seer with his eloquent lyrical vernacular, his visions of life, continuity, time, possibility, and beauty. His poems break my heart and awaken it, at the same time. I feel I have been waiting for his work all my life."
-Naomi Shihab Nye, author of The Tiny Journalist

"Mosab Abu Toha's Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear arrives with such refreshing clarity and voice amidst a sea of immobilizing self-consciousness. It is no great feat to say a complicated thing in a complicated way, but here is a poet who says it plain: 'In Gaza, some of us cannot completely die.' Later, 'This is how we survived.' It’s remarkable. This is poetry of the highest order."
-Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell