There was quite a turnout last Wednesday at Revolution Books in Harlem to support and defend the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, a 2025 Pulitzer Prize winner, who has been targeted with threats and deportation. Toha was unable to attend the event.
“The reason Mosab cannot be with us tonight is because he has been threatened and targeted by the reactionary, right-wing, pro-Israeli thug vigilante organization Betar, which has close ties with the Trump fascist regime,” said Raymond Lotta, spokesperson for Revolution Books. Given these conditions, Lotta said, Mosab has cancelled his book tour. “We stand in solidarity with Mosab and demand that this genocide in Gaza stops.”
After a musical selection from oudist Ramsey and vocalist Nick, Mosab said via a video, “Thank you for standing for us in a time when we are under oppression.” His book of poetry, “Forest of Noise,” was there, and the title poem reads: “A car slides on our asphalt street/like an iron running on an ironing board. But in my city, streets are never flat. Potholes from bombs are everywhere/like crows’ nests in a forest of noise.”
The event featured 10 poets who were invited to share their impressions and offer poems in tribute to Mosab and the struggle of the Palestinian people. Rebecca Chace of Bard College, whose third novel, “Talking to the Wolf,” will be out next year, read short excerpts from other writers, one of whom declared, “We need to replant devastated fields so that Palestinian farmers can grow our food again. We need to replace sites of death with hospitals where people can heal.”
Ru Freeman, a Sri Lankan and American writer, poet, and activist whose latest book is “Bon Courage: Essays on Inheritance, Citizenship & A Creative Life,” arrived at the podium with an arsenal of books, and read this portion: “In Gaza, breathing is a task. Smiling is performing plastic surgery on one’s own face, and rising in the morning, trying to survive another day, is coming back from the dead.”
Barbara Fischkin, journalist and author of three books, took her evening’s inspiration from one of Mosab’s poems, “Olympic Hopscotch League,” a portion of which reads, “Mothers chat in black, a buzzing sound of drones flying above my family and friends stops the games, the chatting and the laughter. A missile falls, only falling into farmland nearby. Shrapnel cuts, electric wires … More missiles come flying in on the lookout for anything that moves.”
David Croft, whose most recent publication is “Live in Suspense,” read from Toha’s book. “It is called Mosab,” he began. “My father gave me a difficult name. Inside it sit two letters that don’t exist in English. My father didn’t know I would have English-speaking friends, always asking how to pronounce my name or trying to avoid saying it.”
Croft also noted that “A camel that is described as Mossab is one that’s difficult to mount and ride.”
Poet and author Pam Laskin, one of the evening’s hosts, read stanzas from Mosab’s poem “Under the Rubble,” including “A father wakes up at night, sees the random colors on the walls, drawn by his four-year-old son, that he’s dead after an airstrike. The colors are about four feet high … Next year, they would be five and six, but the painter is dead and the museum has no new paintings to show.” Her reading differed from the lines in Mosab’s book but were no less effective.
“When I was a kid,” recalled Alicia Suskin Ostriker, a former New York poet laureate, “I distinctly remember 1948, when the United Nations was born and Israel was born. I was 10 and was so happy .. .now there was going to be no more nationalism and no more wars about nationalism. And I was proud of Israel. And today I am ashamed of Israel. I am not ashamed of being a Jew. I’m glad to thank you. I’m glad to be a Jew who is angry over what Israel is doing …”
Dan Sheehan, editor of Book Marks at LitHub and author of the novel “Restless Souls,” appeared virtually, although there were some technical difficulties in deciphering his remarks other than his thanks to Revolution Books for hosting the event. Similar kudos came from Amber Snider, a journalist whose articles have appeared in the New York Times and Teen Vogue. She is the author of “Wonderment” (2025).
“Memorize your dream,” Snider read from one of Mosab’s poems, “Close your eyes and walk on the ocean. Dabble your hand in the water and catch your poem’s words. Write the words up on the clouds. Don’t worry, they’ll find their land. Open your eyes in the night. The sea is no longer blue. Look around and form, and from the descending raindrops pick your punctuation marks. Put on your swimsuit, dive deep down, and look for a title for your epic.”
Next up was Barry Wallenstein, emeritus professor of literature and creative writing at City College. Among his books is “Odd Men Out (Or IN)” (2025). He read from Mosab’ poem “What Is Home?”: “It is the shade of trees on my way to school before they were uprooted. It was my grandparents’ black-and-white wedding photo before the walls crumbled. It is my uncle’s prayer rug, where dozens of ants slept on wintry nights before it was looted and put in a museum. It is the oven my mother used to bake bread [in] before a bomb reduced our house to ashes …”
Near the close of the event, Andy Zee, a spokesperson for Revolution Books’ editorial board of RefuseFascism.org, thanked the poets, who he said “took the responsibility to continue Mosab Abu Toha’s book tour when the actions of reactionary Zionists and a repressive fascist regime in this country have made it too difficult and dangerous for a poet to read his work and continue his tour.”
Click on this link for information about obtaining a copy of Mosab’s book, which closes with, “This is not a poem/this is a grave, not beneath the soil of Homeland, but above a flat, light white rag of paper.”