Theophanies

In Theophanies, award-winning poet Sarah Ghazal Ali testifies to women's capacity for piercing and musical exegesis and asks: what more might a woman’s body hold after it has been hailed as a vessel for the divine? Braiding the scriptures of the Qur’an and Bible, Theophanies interlaces the spectacles of gender, faith, and family and unravels the age-old idea that seeing is believing. Drawing from art and music, Pakistani history, and cultural inheritance, these poems speak back against eons to the matriarchs of the Abrahamic faiths, the mothers at the heart of sacred history.Shortlisted for The Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection 2025Featured in Riz Ahmed's "five creatives I highly rate", WePresent 2025