Book Review: Theophanies
Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali, the 87press, 2025
Reviewed by Paul Chuks
In Theophanies, Sarah Ghazal Ali is a master of querying faith with poetry. She is sometimes investigative in her approach, sometimes confessional, at other times vulnerably echoing human questions about divinity, cultural inheritance, metaphysics, and/or ontology in lush, poetic verses. She opens the collection with a four-sectioned poem, "My Faith Gets Grime Under Its Nails." The first section reads:
— لق
SAY, HE IS ALLAH, THE ONE
I confess to sleeping coiled on my night-
blue prayer mat
more often than standing bent in rukū.
Even when I posture piety
I blink steady, lashes keeping count of the hand-
knotted flowers fringing the rug
rather than God’s pristine names.
The places I’ve prayed—elevators, Victoria’s Secret
fitting room, the muck-slick meadow after rain—
will testify for or against me,
spilling through my Book of Deeds
in ink of blood or honeyed milk.
Here, the speaker confesses the fragility of her faith. She does not let her readers into the world that might have inspired this stanza; she leaves them internally searching themselves for any fault in their faith, wondering, too, if their book of deeds would be written in ink of blood or honeyed milk. The line breaks are well measured and tantalizing that without it done this way, the rhythm of the poem is lost. Suave poetic architecture is proof of a sterling poet who understands that the final riddle of a good poem is manicuring the line breaks till the poems sing.
In the second section, لق—SAY, I SEEK REFUGE IN THE LORD OF MANKIND, faith becomes physically tangible that it can bleed:
My faith is feminine, breasted
and irregularly bleeding.
My faith gets grime under its nails,
unburies maybe-mothers to suckle them sacred.
This is Ali’s speaker rewriting the fate of women who were already headed for gloom, into something more sacred. It would appear that these women have miscarried their babies and are irregularly bleeding, and Ali comes in to save the day by unburying them and suckling them into something sacred. As against the ridicule, disdain and violence reserved for women who lost their babies. In Feminizing her faith, Ali shrouds women away from society’s polemics by dressing them in a religious toga.
In the third section, لق—SAY, I SEEK REFUGE WITH THE LORD OF DAWN, the speaker is looking for respite. She knows her body too well and succinctly encases her menstruation in a fitting metaphor, “Once a month blood roams// like mint over immaculate grass// The adhan trills from my arboreal center// Though excused, I wake// before the white thread of day// break to open my window.” The “immaculate grass” in this context is her thickened uterus. To complete itself, the speaker invites the angels for purification, observation and eventual healing. “let the angels in// to spectate the ache// and erase a sin for every devoted cramp.” The title is graciously in sync with the section in the way it dramatizes the poem. After having let the angel just before morning, she darts forward into the goal of the invitation; to drive the pain away through bargain or plea – “Lord, you pardon my pain// Lord, I parable my name// As best as I can.”
In the last section, the speaker is more remorseful about the many versions of womanhood she has lived. She is critical about the line of women from which she has emerged and is asking to drop the weight she has inherited. "A woman crowned // holy is a calamity worth repeating" is a power-packed line that has the reader reel backwards from its punch, right after enjoying the word choice and combination, with "holy" and "calamity" doing well to create the paradox. In this wicked world where one almost always has to match evil with evil to guarantee survival, a woman’s holiness is never recommended. Yet, if the holy ones who purify the world, bearing the sacrifices of others’ sin, are ridden off the planet, it boils over. Hence, the speaker recommending a repetition of holy women, knowing how calamitous it could be.
Beyond all its ethereal divine fancy, Sarah’s faith is rooted in a real search for meaning. In the second poem, "Sarai," the poet spends an entire line unfurling the linkage between names and personhood. What she finds is a beautiful simile reminiscent of Plato’s abstract world, in which physical forms exist apart from a separate incorporeal world.
A name is not unlike
a sexed body. Like mine,
it carries.
Is remembered most
for what it fails
to yield. A name
is a condition meant to last,
to outlast, as should a daughter, her mother
tongue.
I am but do not have
a daughter.
When I look in the lake,
who looks back
is a sister
self: O, little i—I
carry you as you
carry who I am waiting to be.
The name, having existed independently in the incorporeal world, is gendered and brought into the poem, creating a duality between the person and their name, illuminating each other. The speaker believes "a name / is a condition meant to last // to outlast, as should a daughter, her mother / tongue." But in her case, she does not have a daughter; instead, what she has is a reflection of herself when she stands over a lake—which consequently is a carrying of who she is waiting to be. In essence, the poem is a short filming of a lady standing over a lake, naming her reflection "Sarai," an obvious deviation from Ali, telling her she (Sarai) is her present while Ali is her future self. The poem is as much a speculative poem as it is a metaphysical masterpiece in the Platonist sense. It is also worthy to note the interplay between Sarai and Sarah. In the bible story, Sarai was the childless one whose name later changed to Sarah after she bore a child. Sarai, the speaker in this poem, is also childless—I am but without a daughter—whose future self is Sarah, carrying who she is waiting to be—a mother? Having debauched myself in the intensity and beauty of Theophanies, I have elected this poem as my best poem of the book and of Sarah Ghazal Ali. It is simple—it romances the poetic palate of the reader and shows them how uniquely delicious a poem can be without compounding it with various poetic embellishment that eventually makes a poem vague. The poem leads the reader into a riveting curiosity that makes them question their names, personhood and tries to link them, if they aren’t yet. The poem shows readers what is possible with language and why poetry was and still remains the most intellectual endeavour of any art form.
In "Annunciation," Ali re-moulds the moment when Angel Gabriel tells Maryam that she will bring forth Jesus Christ. Ali rescripts the Islamic narrative and explores the glossed-over perspective of Sarai, Abraham’s wife who stayed barren till she was almost a hundred. "My pillaged body// is not as interesting// as my virginal sister’s// I know. Your books// efface me, dismiss me// as naturally lacking.// So my hair has long// since grayed, cropped// short, held back// under a matronly veil." Ali strongly denounces the deification of conception by casting her speaker as a strong dissenter of impregnation. She is okay with her body not being as interesting as her sister’s body. She is okay with the religious polemics and aspersions pelted at her and her kind. She lets her husband bed another woman in case he too is crazed about conception – all for the sake of belittling it (conception) and giving women, maybe-mothers, a voice. In this way, Ali overturns the patriarchal root of this story and makes room for women like Sarai to exist without suffering the punishment society has reserved for her, without the feeling of self-insufficiency in her womanhood.
Elsewhere, Ali continues dismantling the patriarchy – in "Magdalene," "Motherhood1999" and "Spectacle.” In fact, that appears to be one of the set-out goals of the book: to subdue the patriarchy and give readers a sample of what a matrilineal world looks like. In "Magdalene," Ali argues that even though a woman has consented to childbirth, she might not be ready for the consequences: “We bleed as penance for the curious first.// When we don’t // we dread the burden borne by the immaculate second. // I submitted once, faithfully, and it was years // before I bloated with shame. He touched my hair with unsullied hands." Aside from the unpredictability of conception that the poem tackles, it (the poem) also shows the imbalance scale of sexual responsibility resting on the weight of women, using the story of Mary Magdalene who is historically and culturally depicted as a sex worker despite having sex with men (who’ve gone scot-free from the selective but gripping hands of society’s morality).
"Ghazal on the Day of" comes with its own anonymity. After being dished with piercing poems about faith and the lethality of womanhood as shaped by society, the reader is wrapped from the knowing of the subject of the poem as they approach the page. The anonymity squashes off immediately after the first line. “Like God, I’ll create in my image// Go on, pass judgment…” The reader is made known by the speaker now that they have metamorphosed into Godliness and will cosplay Godhood; judgment. The entirety of the poem is premised on this concept and so it sprawls out with intense dramatization. Knowing the implications of challenging the status quo of (the metaphysical, society), the speaker anticipates their punishment – judgment while also judging. “—like I’m not already waiting for judgment// like I don’t tease, don’t taunt to turn His eye my way// Like I’m not expiring, short-sticked by a judgment// foretold in unteachable, spiraling math. Each sky’s/ bloated yolk barrels toward the day of judgment// Seeded, I take seeds to stifle my soil’s waiting green/ I liken my name to apology. I wield judgment// like a snapped beak and shovel night from my abdomen/ Are you watching, O corkscrew calamity, O decree// O closer than jugular? Come for this constellating mess/ I’m sorry for laughing, O giver, not for taking, so judge.” The poem is complete now and the reader understands why the title was left incomplete. It would have been titled "Ghazal on the Day of Judgment" if Ali did not enter the poem with the intention of sparking curiosity in the mind of the readers. I reckon Sarah named the poem tongue in cheek, tricking readers into completing it themselves, as if finalizing the realization that comes with the poem. After the speaker preempts God’s judgment which she takes to be harsh, she humorously accepts her fate by caricaturizing the initial judgment, making it known that it couldn’t get any worse, both parties should get it over with.
Readers who are shy of examining their faith critically will squirm at the boldness of Theophanies but will leave with questions and paradoxes that will make them wish they wielded a time machine to go back in time and correct the things we have gotten wrong about women. As for those who have refused to be fear-mongered into valuing their religion wholesale without necessary criticism, and have since started challenging their faith, this is a classic to savour.
