Sarah Ghazal Ali

Theophanies, selected as the Editors Choice for the 2022 Alice James Award, is a testament to women's capacity for piercing and musical exegesis. What does it mean to have a woman’s body when that body has been hailed a vessel for the divine? Braiding the scriptures of the Qur’an and the Bible, Theophanies explores the complexities and spectacles of gender, faith, and family by unraveling the age-old idea that seeing is believing. Through art and music, Pakistani history, and scriptural stories, these poems speak back against time to the matriarchs of the Abrahamic faiths, the mothers at the heart of sacred history. Stitched throughout is longing―for mothers, angels, and signs from the divine. In the absence of matrilineal elders in her family, the speaker turns to the archetypal “mother of nations” for whom she is named, Sarah, and her sent-away “sister,” Hajar, to better reckon with her place in the mother line.