Theophanies - by Sarah Ghazal Ali (Paperback)

About the Book

"Navigating both scripture and culture, the poems in Theophanies work to spin miracles from the mundanities of desire and violence. Through art and music, Pakistani history, and scriptural stories, these poems struggle to envision a true self and speak back against time to the matriarchs of the larger Abrahamic faiths, the mothers at the heart of sacred history. Stitched through these poems is longing for mothers, angels, and signs from the divine"--

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 2025 GLCA New Writers Award (Poetry)

Moving between the scriptures of the Qur'an and the Bible, the poems of Theophanies arise from the speaker's tenuous grip on her own faith while navigating the colonial legacy of Partition and inherited patriarchal expectations of womanhood.

Sarah Ghazal Ali's award-winning debut, Theophanies explores the complexities and spectacles of gender, faith, and family, its poems working to spin miracles from the mundanities of desire and violence. Through art and music, Pakistani history, and scriptural stories, Theophanies struggles to envision a true self and speak back against time to the matriarchs of the larger Abrahamic faiths--the mothers at the heart of sacred history.

Theophanies asks: What does it mean to have a woman's body when that body has been hailed a vessel for the divine? Is seeing really believing, and is believing belonging? The speaker seeks to understand her own, bewildering "I," to use it with reverence, and to mythologize herself and all mothers to ensure their survival in a male-dominated world hard at work erasing them. Stitched through these poems is longing--for mothers, angels, and signs from the divine.

Review Quotes

Winner of the 2025 California Book Award

Winner of the 2025 GLCA New Writers Award for Poetry

The 2022 Alice James Award Editor's Choice

A Finalist for the 2025 Kate Tufts Discovery Award

A Finalist for the 2025 Eric Hoffer - First Horizons Award

A Finalist for the 2025 Eric Hoffer - Grand Prize

A Finalist for the 2025 Eric Hoffer - da Vinci Eye

A Finalist for the 2024 Golden Poppy Awards' Martin Cruz Smith Award: Emerging Diverse Voices

Longlisted for the 2024 Julie Suk Award

"The award-winning début collection from Pakistani-American poet Ali is a fearless exploration of faith, gender and inheritance."
--The Bookseller

"Sarah Ghazal Ali's debut collection Theophanies (Alice James Books, 2024) is a verb-charged, voice-laden lyric wherein belief is nothing so static that it could yield an image. With vignettes drawn from scripture and childhood fables alike, Theophanies is a navigation of faith and its unique solaces and strifes in family, gender, and desire."
--Amogha, Split Lip Magazine

"Bursting with angels, unfurling, and awe, Ali's marvelous debut, page after page, dazzles. Through a "Matrilineage" series, ghazals, litanies, and self-portraits, this book delves into dreams, family, faith, names, and womanhood. In January, I let the poems wash over me. For my second read, I looked up scriptural figures, words like ichor, and Leila Chatti's "Confession" (mentioned in the "Notes"). Maybe next time I'll star every appearance of feathers, adding to the marginalia of loved-on lines like these from "Aurat: " "Desire made a door of me / and I kept it ajar." All of this to say: Theophanies belongs in hands, totes, and on nightstands."
--Connie Pan

"Describing the speaker of the poems as someone who bleeds, lusts, gives birth, and dreams of abortions, Ali wields visceral bodily descriptions and subversive transformations of religious narratives to assert that women and their wombs are the true bearers of humanity. ... With Theophanies, Ali celebrates the mother line as something that rebels against the confinements of narrow belief systems and resists the inclination for women to be written out."
--Chloe Xiang, Harvard Review Online

"This compelling collection has a highly original and sustained voice ... I haven't read a book of poems that so fully explores the relationship between soul and body"
--Janet McCann, Mom Egg Review

"A debut collection full of twists and turns, Theophanies is energetic, critically engaging, and linguistically rigorous. There is much to admire in these rich and varied poems, which carry the reader with relentless momentum toward a fixed point on the horizon. What is this point? Perhaps it is a realization of womanhood which is not wounding or violent, but peaceful. Ali is not simply writing the poems we want, but the poems we need."
--Joanna Acevedo, Rain Taxi

"With its formal triumphs and sure voice, Theophanies is a powerful debut. Ali unpacks the lineage of not only her name, but womanhood, from the mother of nations herself, and firmly marks her place in the matrilineal line."
--Mudroom Magazine

"...as I remember that the crux of a theophany is the act of bestowment, I see how this collection interrogates the very definition of divine."
--Swati Sudarsan, Northwest Review

"...questions lead to the speaker's crisis of faith in the eponymously titled 'Theophanies': 'How to hold wide my eyes / for the ineluctable light?' (83). I am grateful that Ali doesn't offer a glib answer. Instead, she looks beyond easy narratives about blind devotion, telling us to listen. 'Every temporal sight' she warns us, is 'either a miracle or mistake.' (83)"
--Rosanna Young Oh, RHINO Poetry

"This is a poet confident in her ability to rifle through the wreckage and canon of the world's most popular religious histories to uncover the songs of the living and the dead."
--Sanna Wani, Canthius

"In Theophanies, the poised debut collection from Muslim poet Sarah Ghazal Ali, spiritual enlightenment is a female, embodied experience, mediated by matriarchs. ... Wordplay, floral metaphors, and multiple ghazals make for dazzling language. Ali's poetry, both elegant and visceral, gives women's bodily and spiritual experiences primacy."
--Rebecca Foster, Shelf Awareness Starred Review

"In Sarah Ghazal Ali's Theophanies she brings the best of both worlds, through this poetic exegesis of Islamic faith in a way that stunned me -- page by page, poem by poem. Have you ever read a poetry collection that made you shout aloud how good it was while reading it? That's the impact that this work impressed upon me as a reader."
--Ronnie K. Stephens, The Poetry Question

"a stirring examination of faith, womanhood, and cultural inheritance through lyric poems that reimagine female figures and stories from the Islamic tradition. ... Devoted to unsilencing voices through fresh language, Ali compels us toward more generous, inclusive ways of seeing, being in, and believing in the world."
--Adedayo Agarau, Los Angeles Review of Books

"In this expansive debut collection, Ali draws from the Quran and the Bible as vehicles for a deeper consideration of the intersections of family, gender, and faith. ... These powerful, resonant poems herald an exciting new voice."
--Publishers Weekly Starred Review

"Ali's is one of the most sure-footed debuts I've had the pleasure to encounter in many years. Wrought with precision, control, and an astute humility before the wondrous, the profound and profane, these poems feel crafted from the sum total of history, then realized at the crest of the poet's matrix of experiences. A truly fearless and tender gem of a collection."
--Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds

"Sarah Ghazal Ali's debut collection, Theophanies, pulses with life--angels, cranes, and a woman's own fierce potential, the miraculous and terrifying possibilities she holds within her heart, womb, and mind. Through sinuous lyric and religious persona, Ali delves unblinkingly into the depths of faith, family, and womanhood. These poems are bold, insistent reckonings that reach across time and geography, a chorus of female voices demanding to be heard."
--Leila Chatti

"That god's words would be splintered into many forms and tongues is inevitable and appropriate. This book utilizes many forms, ancient and new, to contend with the long legacy of a multitude of spiritual traditions: the expulsion from the divine, living in gendered bodies, the fate of humans to live as mortal. There's music aplenty here to accompany difficult truths, and that is really all one can ask of god or garden or ghazal."
--Kazim Ali, author of The Voice of Sheila Chandra

About the Author

Sarah Ghazal Ali is the author of Theophanies (Alice James Books, 2024), selected as Editors' Choice for the 2022 Alice James Award. A Djanikian Scholar, her poems and essays appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, Pleiades, the Rumpus, Haydens Ferry Review, Best New Poets 2022, and elsewhere. She is the editor-in-chief of Palette Poetry, poetry editor for West Branch, and a '22-23 Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University. Learn more at sarahgali.com.