In Part 2 of our in-depth interview with Palestinian writer Mosab Abu Toha, he reads several poems from his new book Forest of Noise, half of which he says was written before the start of Israel’s war on Gaza and the other half in the year since. He also discusses how friends and family of his have been killed by Israel, U.S. media portrayals of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, learning English and founding the Edward Said Library in Gaza, and using his writing to convey the Palestinian reality to the rest of the world.

“Writing poetry does not come from a beautiful place,” he says. “The painful thing about poetry, and the poetry that I write, is that I’m not only writing about something that happened, which is the case for so many people, but I’m writing about something that unfortunately continues to happen.”