Theophanies

Shortlisted for The Forward Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection 2025

Featured in Riz Ahmed's "five creatives I highly rate" WePresent 2025

Winner of the California Book Award 2025

Shortlisted for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award 2025

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.

"Sarah’s collection of poems in Theophanies weaves together faith, doubt, and the female body into a tight knot—one that lived in the pit of my stomach long after I had read it." —Riz Ahmed

"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