English professor remakes women of faith in debut poetry collection

In Abrahamic Scripture, women of faith are often overlooked, if not ignored entirely. Yet without them, the male prophets, along with their wisdom, at the center of these stories would not exist. In her debut collection of poems titled Theophanies (Alice James Books, 2024), which was published earlier this year, award-winning poet and English Professor Sarah Ghazal Ali explores the idea of what it means to have a woman’s body when in Scripture that body is used to bring forth a divine message or prophet.

Q: How would you describe this collection?

A: Theophanies is a poetry collection that’s preoccupied with naming and with questions about living in a gendered body that has a number of burdens and expectations projected upon it. As a whole, the book is curious about the women of faith in Abrahamic Scripture. The speakers in the book look to and then embody those women as examples of what an elevated or ideal vision of womanhood could be. It begins with a speaker who shares my name, Sarah, and is curious about our namesake Sarah who is the wife of Abraham in the Bible and the Quran. 

Q: A theophany is defined as a visible manifestation of a deity, or a revelation, if you will. What is it about revelations that interests you as a poet and artist?

A: I think that I as a writer and the speakers that I’m working with in the book are looking for signs. All of my speakers are isolated women who desperately want to feel like God could speak to them, or that God is paying attention to them in the way they’ve read that God has spoken to and paid attention to men throughout history. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I would want a female prophet or want to be a female prophet, but I’m curious about where women find messages or signs from God, and where women feel most seen by, or in the presence of, the divine.

Scripture is also where I first fell in love with poetry. The Quran in Arabic is rhythmic, very musical and also mysterious. Arabic is a language where one word can have a number of different interpretations, so it feels like every possible reading of a verse is its own revelation of a kind. That open-endedness and interpretability influenced my appreciation for poetry as a channel for epiphany through multiple meanings. 

Q: In many of the poems in this collection, you show an interest in names, particularly women’s names. What’s in a name for you?

A: I think everything is in a name. Names are the first things we’re given in life, and they’re meant to be these weighty honorifics of sorts that hold an attribute or quality that we work to embody throughout our lives. My interest in names stems from first seeing my family tree when I was in college, and finding that all of the women’s names were missing. I was so excited to see it and to find myself, my mother, and my grandmother, but none of our names were there, and in there place were just visual gaps. So for me, the obsession with naming is in some ways a response to this crisis of absence that I faced where I felt as if I didn’t know enough about the women in my own family. Though I couldn’t look to them and call forth their specific names, I could, at the very least, look to the women in Scripture whose names and stories I do have access to and use them as models of womanhood instead.

Q: How does this mystery around your family history show up in your collection?

A: It shows up explicitly in the three “Matrilineage” poems in Theophanies; those are the poems where I’m also experimenting most heavily with fixed forms. One (“Matrilineage [Recovered]”) is written in the shape of a family tree to visually explore the gaps in my actual family tree. Another (“Matrilineage [Umbilicus]”) is a contrapuntal, which is a poem written in columns that can be read three different ways. The idea there was to weave in as many voices as possible – if you can read a poem three ways, you can experience it through three different perspectives. Because I don’t have access to all the names that I want access to in life, and I’m looking to women who don’t really have a voice in Scripture but are instead spoken about, I’m trying to weave together as many voices as possible in my work to create figures that have agency. 

Q: You have said you were not raised in a particularly religious household and that your mother is Sunni and your father is Shia. How does your own experience with religion come through in this collection? 

A: What I set out to do was write poems that are comfortable in ambivalence and the in-between space between right and wrong. Because I grew up in between two very different sects of Islam, I’ve had to make my own way through my faith and figure out what I believe, how I move through life, and what feels right in my own practice. I didn’t want to write poems that were disrespectful to any tenets of my faith—that was extremely important to me—but I also didn’t want to shy away from asking questions without fear.  

Q: Like what questions, for example? 

A: One in particular was the question that if women are made to give birth to men who go on to be prophets, why are those women not centered or more present in religious stories? I also had questions about the way culture and religion tend to be conflated. I’m South Asian, and often, I’ve noticed that patriarchal elements of culture can become synonymous in some minds with Islam. Teasing those elements apart can be complicated and feel heavy, especially when your family members might read those poems. 

Q: How do you know when you’re finished with a poem?

A: That is the eternal question that I think every poet is trying to answer for themselves. For me, a poem feels done when I feel exhausted with it. I tend to revise line-by-line as I write, which is a bizarre process and not one that I recommend to anyone else, but it has historically worked for me. By the time I reach the final line, I feel completely depleted. That’s when I know I’m finished, at least for the time being. In the context of a collection or a book, the only concrete way I know I’m finished is when I’ve reached the deadline that my publisher gave me. I feel like if I open my book now, I’ll find twenty more things that I want to revise, but the book is “done” because someone else told me it has to be done!

Q: What do you want readers to take away most from this collection?

A: I read poetry to learn new things, to encounter new ideas, and to feel like new horizons can be opened up for me. Often when people read something and they encounter a word or an idea that they’ve never encountered before, they won’t even do the work of Googling it before dismissing it as inaccessible or not meant for them. I hope that people will be open minded and sincerely want to engage new-to-them ideas— and to feel after they read the book that they want to encounter and engage with even more. 

Q: You recently became a new mom to a baby girl. What do you hope your daughter takes away from this collection when she reads it at some point in the future?

A: I hope that if and when she reads this book, she comes away feeling like there’s room in the world for her own questions about the way she lives and moves through the world, and that she feels like she’s a woman with agency. I want her to feel that she has the ability to do her own exegesis around the tenets that she chooses to live her life by.