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Theophanies

Sarah Ghazal Ali author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:The 87 Press

Publishing:16th Jan '25

£14.99

This title is due to be published on 16th January, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Theophanies cover

Award-winning debut collection from Pakistani-American poet. Described as a "fearless and tender gem" by Ocean Vuong.

This collection interlaces the spectacles of gender, faith, and family and unravels the age-old idea that seeing is believing. Theophanies 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?

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.

"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."

* 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."

-- Chloe Xiang * 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"

-- Janet McCann * 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."

-- Joanna Acevedo

“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.”

-- Adedayo Ag

ISBN: 9781068644658

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

88 pages