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.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"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 * 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 -- 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" - Mom Egg Review -- 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 Agarau
Sprache
Verlagsort
Produkt-Hinweis
Maße
Höhe: 231 mm
Breite: 150 mm
Dicke: 9 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-1-0686446-5-8 (9781068644658)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
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.
