Theophanies

Winner of the 2025 GLCA New Writers Award for PoetryMoving between the scriptures of the Quran and the Bible, the poems of Theophaniesarisefrom the speakers tenuous grip on her own faith while navigating the colonial legacy of Partition and inherited patriarchal expectations of womanhood.Sarah Ghazal Ali's award-winningdebut, 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, Theophaniesstruggles to envision a true self and speak back against time to the matriarchs of the larger Abrahamic faithsthe mothers at the heart of sacred history.Theophanies asks: What does it mean to have a womans 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 longingfor mothers, angels, and signs from the divine.