Reviews tagging 'Injury/Injury detail'

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza by Mosab Abu Toha

27 reviews

shannon_magee's review

dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad fast-paced

4.75

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Injury/Injury detail

Moderate: Grief, Death, War, and Blood

cheyison's review against another edition

emotional sad slow-paced

4.0

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Violence, Death, Genocide, Injury/Injury detail, and War

siandee's review

challenging emotional reflective sad fast-paced

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Violence, Xenophobia, Injury/Injury detail, Medical trauma, and War

careinthelibrary's review

challenging dark emotional informative sad tense medium-paced

5.0

I thought this was great. The poet wrote in such a sensory way that I felt drawn into the space he created. The smells, sensations, sounds. There's a poem that references teeth chattering that I really felt, for example. Small but mighty. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Child death, Genocide, Violence, Colonisation, Death, Gun violence, Grief, Injury/Injury detail, Murder, and War

puttingwingsonwords's review

reflective sad fast-paced

4.5

This was my main read for #ReadPalestineWeek. I also finished the Activestills book I was already reading, which I posted about previously, and started Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis.

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear is an impressive poetry collection about life in Palestine, and specifically Gaza.

‘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.’

Abu Toha’s poetry zooms in on mundane things and shows how they are twisted in a life under occupation and under siege; but also how they are a source of beauty, however small.

‘Through it all, the strawberries have never stopped growing.’

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Colonisation and Death

Moderate: Child death, Violence, Grief, and Injury/Injury detail

Minor: Medical content

yourbookishbff's review

challenging dark reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, by Mosab Abu Toha, feels like it was written yesterday, and the continued relevancy of this collection is what makes it so gut-wrenching to read. A Palestinian poet born in and currently living in Gaza, Toha recounts first-hand experiences living through Israeli attacks. Some occur during prolonged conflicts - like those in 2014 or 2021 - and other incidents are described as the routine occurrences of violence in occupied Gaza. The incessant sound of drones, the constant threat of aerial attack, the accessibility of the beach to Israeli naval patrols - all are woven together in a net of surveillance that shadows day-to-day life. Toha's voice is reflective and unfiltered as it drifts between memories of family and images of leveled homes, reflections on ancestry and odes to death. As we bear witness to the horrors of occupation and ethnic cleansing in 2023, I am haunted by Toha's plea in US and THEM: "I want to build my house on a swing. / I don't want to walk on this earth"

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Colonisation, Injury/Injury detail, Murder, War, and Death

sophiareads_'s review

challenging emotional reflective sad

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Injury/Injury detail, Violence, and War

Moderate: Death and Colonisation