Theophanies

Winner of the 2025 GLCA New Writers Award for 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.