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    Theophanies
    Theophanies
    Theophanies
    Ebook88 pages29 minutes

    Theophanies

    By Sarah Ghazal Ali

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    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. 

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAlice James Books
    Release dateJan 17, 2024
    ISBN9781949944310
    Theophanies

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    • 5/5
      Utterly astonishing! A book written in fire.

    Book preview

    Theophanies - Sarah Ghazal Ali

    Sarai

    A name is not unlike

    a sexed body. Like mine,

    it carries.

    Is remembered most

    for what it fails

    to yield. A name

    is a condition meant to last,

    to outlast, as should a daughter, her mother

    tongue.

    I am but do not have

    a daughter.

    When I look in the lake,

    who looks back

    is a sister

    self: O, little i—I

    carry you as you

    carry who I am waiting to be.

    Theophanies

    A pair of apples blistering under the sun—

    my eyes have been so saturated.

    Before dreamdeep, I start awake, overstimulated

    by the stacking of my bones, their caress and jostle.

    My granted days I could live or leave. Each loaned

    breath I can—do—waste or wield, straining

    for the bell in belief. How an arrow flees limb to pierce.

    How a pen bleeds to grant shape to speech.

    In each instance of angels’ descent,

    they soothe: Do not fear, O Hajar, Maryam,

    vesseled thee. Or is it awe that clamors the flesh?

    A raptor’s lean shadow for a flash

    obliterating the high-noon sun: may it

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