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

Prizes

Winner of California Book Award 2025 (United States),Short-listed for The Forward Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection 2025 (UK),Winner of GLCA New Writers Award for Poetry 2025 (United States),Winner of Julie Suk Award 2024 (United States),Runner-up for Alice James Award 2022 (United States),Short-listed for Kate Tufts Discovery Award 2025 (United States),Short-listed for Eric Hoffer - First Horizons Award 2025 (United States),Short-listed for Eric Hoffer - Grand Prize 2025 (United States),Short-listed for Eric Hoffer - da Vinci Eye 2025 (United States),Short-listed for Golden Poppy Awards' Martin Cruz Smith Award: Emerging Diverse Voices 2024 (United States)

In this expansive debut collection, Ali draws from the Quran and the Bible as vehicles for a deeper consideration of the intersections of family, gender, and faith... These powerful, resonant poems herald an exciting new voice. —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Describing the speaker of the poems as someone who bleeds, lusts, gives birth, and dreams of abortions, Ali wields visceral bodily descriptions and subversive transformations of religious narratives to assert that women and their wombs are the true bearers of humanity. ... With Theophanies, Ali celebrates the mother line as something that rebels against the confinements of narrow belief systems and resists the inclination for women to be written out. —Harvard Review

This compelling collection has a highly original and sustained voice ... I haven’t read a book of poems that so fully explores the relationship between soul and body. —Mom Egg Review

A debut collection full of twists and turns, Theophanies is energetic, critically engaging, and linguistically rigorous. There is much to admire in these rich and varied poems, which carry the reader with relentless momentum toward a fixed point on the horizon. What is this point? Perhaps it is a realization of womanhood which is not wounding or violent, but peaceful. Ali is not simply writing the poems we want, but the poems we need. —Rain Taxi

A stirring examination of faith, womanhood, and cultural inheritance through lyric poems that reimagine female figures and stories from the Islamic tradition... Devoted to unsilencing voices through fresh language, Ali compels us toward more generous, inclusive ways of seeing, being in, and believing in the world. —The Los Angeles Review of Books

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

Sarah Ghazal Ali is a poet and editor. A Stadler and Kundiman Fellow and recipient of The Sewanee Review poetry prize, her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She is the poetry editor for West Branch and an Assistant Professor of English at Macalester College.