Virtual Craft Chat with Poet Sarah Ghazal Ali

Poet Lore and The Writer’s Center present a FREE virtual chat about the craft of poetry! We’re joined by Sarah Ghazal Ali to discuss her celebrated collection, Theophanies. Sarah is in conversation with Emily Holland, poet and editor of Poet Lore.

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Sarah Ghazal Ali is the author of Theophanies (Alice James Books, 2024), selected as the Editors’ Choice for the 2022 Alice James Award. A Djanikian Scholar, Stadler Fellow, and winner of the 2022 Sewanee Review Poetry Prize, her poems and essays appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She is the poetry editor for West Branch and lives in the Bay Area, California. Learn more at sarahgali.com.

About the Book
Moving between the scriptures of the Qur’an and the Bible, the poems in Sarah Ghazal Ali’s debut, Theophanies, explore the complexities and spectacles of gender, faith, and family by unraveling the age-old idea that seeing is believing. Navigating both scripture and culture, the poems in Theophanies work to spin miracles from the mundanities of desire and violence. Stitched through these poems is longing—for mothers, angels, and signs from the divine—and question if seeing is really believing, and is believing belonging? Theophanies arises from the speaker’s tenuous grip on her own faith while navigating the colonial legacy of Partition and inherited patriarchal expectations of womanhood.

“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

“That god’s words would be splintered into many forms and tongues is inevitable and appropriate. This book utilizes many forms, ancient and new, to contend with the long legacy of a multitude of spiritual traditions: the expulsion from the divine, living in gendered bodies, the fate of humans to live as mortal. There’s music aplenty here to accompany difficult truths, and that is really all one can ask of god or garden or Ghazal.” —Kazim Ali

“Sarah Ghazal Ali’s debut collection, Theophanies, pulses with life—angels, cranes, and a woman’s own fierce potential, the miraculous and terrifying possibilities she holds within her heart, womb, and mind. Through sinuous lyric and religious persona, Ali delves unblinkingly into the depths of faith, family, and womanhood. These poems are bold, insistent reckonings that reach across time and geography, a chorus of female voices demanding to be heard.” —Leila Chatti