Purchase Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear here.

The poems in Things You May Find Hidden in my Ear 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.

Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, scholar, and librarian who was born in Gaza and has spent his life there. He is the founder of the Edward Said Library, Gaza’s first English-language library. Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear won an American Book Award, a 2022 Palestine Book Award, and was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry as well as the 2022 Walcott Poetry Prize.

"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,