UMass hosts Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha in ‘Poems From Gaza’

Graphic by Cat Alexander ’28

By Sarah Grinnell ’26

Books Editor

Trigger warning: this article contains mentions of genocide, violence, and death.

Mosab Abu Toha began his talk at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a sobering statement: “Today, September 16, 2025, Israel killed 110 people in Gaza.” 

What perhaps made the number given by Abu Toha most harrowing was our prescient awareness as an audience that it would only continue to climb: That, by the time this article has been published, hundreds more refugees will have been killed at the hands of Israel. 

A Palestinian poet, short story writer and Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist from Gaza, Mosab Abu Toha has been using poetry to document the atrocities committed against the Palestinian people since the release of his debut collection in 2022, “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear,” reminding us that the fight for Palestinian existence has been going on far longer than since Oct. 7, 2023.

Sponsored by various departments at UMass Amherst, ranging from the Political Economy Research Institute to the Asian and Asian American Arts and Culture Program of the Fine Arts Center University Libraries, “Poems from Gaza: An Evening with Palestinian Writer & Librarian Mosab Abu Toha” was far more somber than celebratory, haunted by an overwhelming sense of absence. Indeed, the poems which Abu Toha chose to read represented chilling time capsules of what is no more: poems which continue to author their own obsoletion. 

As Abu Toha repeatedly reminded the audience, many of the people and places he wrote about in 2021 and 2022 simply do not exist anymore. Whether that is Refaat Alareer, the Palestinian writer and poet who inspired Abu Toha’s poem “A Request: After Refaat Alareer,” who was killed in an airstrike in December of 2023. Or Abu Toha’s “many friends and relatives who were killed and buried under the rubble,” to whom he dedicated his poem “Right or Left.” Even the Edward Said Public Library in Gaza, which Abu Toha founded, is now reduced to rubble.

When prefacing “We Are Looking For Palestine,” Abu Toha observed this self-prophesying nature of so many of his poems. 

As he put it, “Sometimes I write things out of my trauma, and now they are happening. Palestine is searching for us. People are buried under the rubble of their houses.”

But while Abu Toha’s reading seemed to reflect an overwhelming futility of language — indeed, he told the audience, “I do not know what is the value of words in the face of this genocide” — the question-and-answer portion of the evening also attested to the integral role that poetry is playing in bearing witness to the atrocities that governments around the world are attempting to turn away from.

The Q&A began as a conversation between Abu Toha and George Abraham, the Palestinian American poet and writer-in-residence at Amherst College, where they discussed the written word’s ability to resist what Abraham termed “memoricide.” While Abu Toha noted, “My poetry did not save the lives of my loved ones,” it does have the ability to “save their stories.”

“It is my way to show you what you are not seeing in your mainstream media,” he explained. As poems like “We Are Looking for Palestine” demonstrate the loss not just of life but the erasure of existence — of Palestinians’ houses, neighborhoods, possessions — Abu Toha’s work shows how poetry becomes a way of resisting such “memoricide,” to fill in some of the absences through a commitment to keep “looking for Palestine.”

In the vein of bearing witness, a particularly powerful moment came in the form of Abu Toha playing recordings on his phone of airstrikes he experienced while still living in Gaza. For a few minutes, Bowker Auditorium was filled with the sounds of booms and shots. Yet this could only capture a fractional facsimile of the horror Palestinians are experiencing on the ground. 

“So what can we do?” This was one question asked during the Q&A session, and is perhaps the question on the mind of many Mount Holyoke students. Abu Toha put it quite simply:

No matter what form our action or activism takes in this time — donation, organization or simply uplifting the words of people like Abu Toha — the important thing is that, at the end of all this, “Every one of us should be ready to meet a Gazan child.” 

Karishma Ramkarran ’27 contributed fact checking. 

Poetry to read: work by the 2023 Glascock contest judges

By Emma Platt ’26

Staff Writer

The Glascock Poetry Contest took place last week during the first weekend of National Poetry Month and featured work by students from across New England. The competition was judged by poets Eileen Myles, Evie Shockley and Hoa Nguyen. These established poets read selections of their work on the Saturday of the competition, but could only showcase a small portion of their work. For those wishing to explore more of their poetry, here are three more works by these authors.

“Prophesy” by Eileen Myles

In this poem, Myles uses both humor and evocative and odd imagery to transport the reader into a strange world that Myles writes from. Down to their writing utensil being “the devil’s cock” which is like “a fat burnt crayon.” Myles uses the Devil as a clear reference to the personification of pure evil. The poem is in free verse and lacks punctuation except for one period in the middle. 

Myles is from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is a graduate of UMass Boston. They have published twenty volumes of both poetry and prose fiction as well as art journalism and libretto work. They have received four Lambda Book Awards, the Shelley Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and several other accolades.

“her tin skin” by Evie Shockley

In this poem, Shockley writes about insecurity and wishing to be like another person on the surface. She wants the subject’s “tin skin,” which is repeated over and over in the poem. She describes the subject’s “militant barbie breast” and “mountainous” curves as things that she desires. Shockley writes about her own brownness as well: “i / want my brownness / to cover all but the silver / edges of my tin skin.”

A graduate of Northwestern University, the University of Michigan and Duke University, Shockley is from Nashville, Tennessee. She has had fellowships with Cave Canem, the Millay Colony for the Arts, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. She has also been honored with the Holmes National Poetry Prize.

“Unused Baby” by Hoa Nguyen

In this poem, Nguyen writes with imagery from nature, folklore and religion to create a confusing but fascinating piece. She uses images of everything from blood to frogs to form strong images in the reader’s mind, drawing them in. This is similar to her general style of poetry, which poet Ocean Vuong once described as, “a poetics insistent on fragmentation and rupture as a mode of thinking and being in the world — one where, paradoxically, the very notion of fragmentation is, in itself, a whole. Her poems remind us that meaning, as we understand it, does not have to adhere to standard conventions of syntax.”

Nguyen was born in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam, and grew up in the  United States before settling in Canada where she now lives. She has written several books throughout her career and has been nominated for the Griffin Prize, Kingsley Tufts Award, National Book Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award. She has taught creative writing at the graduate and undergraduate levels as well as at community colleges