At Baptist summer camp, we would sing "Father Abraham" before every breakfast. "Father Abraham had many sons," we'd belt, our shrill voices echoing through the mess hall. "Many sons had Father Abraham. I am one of them." I'd go quiet here. Because I actually wasn't one of them. I was a girl, a daughter, an omission. "And so are you. So let's just praise the Lord! Right arm!" I'd raise my arm and wonder the whole time where I fit in and who our mother might be.

 

Sarah Ghazal Ali explores these questions in Theophanies, her luminous 2025 debut from Alice James Books. In this collection, Ali embodies her namesake, Sarah, wife of Abraham, father of modern religion. And through that embodiment, Ali builds something truly radical: a matrilineal spiritual and sexual inheritance for daughters like me who were always aching with that unanswerable wonder. Ali takes the stories and language and sacraments of Abrahamic tradition, rituals and tongues withheld from women for so many centuries, and refuses to leave them untouched, unexplored. The collection weaves Ali’s own experience through Sarah's, and what emerges is something at once ancient and immediate. Daughters of daughters of daughters.

 

Ali is unsparing about what womanhood in the Abrahamic tradition has required. In "Annunciation," she writes: 

 

My pillaged body

is not as interesting

as my virginal sister’s,

I know. Your books

efface me, dismiss me

as naturally lacking.

 

Ali’s use of the word “pillage” is of particular interest in that it indicates a “great loss to the owner, completely stripping or despoiling them of their property,” but also possibly touches on a figurative use of the Latin pilare ‘to strip of hair,’ perhaps also meaning "to skin" (compare figurative extension of verbs pluck, fleece). Pillage is a word with a deep, ancient violence to it, and the poem uses that connotative play to pointedly name what religious texts so often refuse: that women's bodies have been subject to a brutal economy of purity that serves no one but the men maintaining it. Ali crystallizes the near-constant fantasy embedded in this point with her poem “When Nabra Hassanen Wakes Up in Jannah" when she imagines: 

 

There will be

no need for hijab here, no

men with appraising eyes, no

reason to ever again face rage.

Nabra Hassanen will walk

and reach for fruit, remembering

her mother, all those years

knifing berries into ordinary bowls.

 

The relief here is created by the narrator’s gentle erasure of Nabra’s former burdens: the hijab which did not save her, the men’s eyes, and the subsequent, inexorable rage. 

    

Ali’s deft use of repetition in her loose pantoum "Mother of Nations" mimics the cyclical anxiety of reproduction, how we find ourselves, “waiting/ each month for the inevitable wilt/ of a cervix sucked clean, scraped raw.” The looseness of the form, how the repeated lines mutate and reassemble, also lends to the irregularity of the experience, how often the mysticism and chaos embedded in the menstrual cycle are boiled down to a “bewildered laugh.” Syntactically, Ali anchors the monthly waiting to the sound of a barren womb. You can feel the exhaustion in the narrator’s careful reluctance to repeat herself exactly, which renders a cyclical quality to a suffering that never fully resolves. And Ali makes us sit in that exquisitely tender feeling for so many beats, to excruciating and transformative effect.

 

Ali’s "Matrilineage [Parthenogenesis]" reveals the structures beneath that suffering by building a revelatory family tree out of only women from Islamic history, tracing their interconnections, sitting with the contradictions of their legacies. But Ali goes further than discovery here; she alters the rules of lineage. The poem gestures toward parthenogenesis, “a form of reproduction in which offspring are produced without the involvement of male fertilization,” as a natural kind of virgin birth but not in the doctrinal sense. The title leads us toward a more biological understanding of maternity that still ultimately re-centers the miracle of birth in a way that removes men from the process altogether. Parthenogenesis becomes both metaphor and method: a lineage generated entirely through women, daughters inheriting from mothers in an unbroken, self-sustaining line. In this way, Ali mirrors and subverts the logic of patrilineal genealogies, which so often erase women to preserve the illusion of a pure male line. Here, that erasure is reversed. Men fall out of the frame silently, with such ease. The effect is not just corrective but generative, opening the possibility of a spiritual inheritance that does not depend on male mediation, a lineage that grows insistently through women alone. 

 

"Matrilineage [Umbilicus]" extends this project into the body itself and into the very architecture of the poem on the page. The form is umbilical: lines split across a deep caesura, readable in multiple directions, meaning pooling differently depending on the path you take through them. I use the term partly because the word shares an etymology with cesarean section, in particular the act of cutting, delivery, and bringing through the veil. I don't think that's accidental here. Ali is interested in how things come out of bodies and what they carry with them when they do.

 

The line "the first inheritance a puncture wound" can also be read as "the first inheritance / where you detach," and both are true at once. The directionality opens us up to a layering of meaning that creates a kind of threaded duet, voices doubled and echoing and made briefly one before separating again. The polymorphism mirrors how maternity actually operates: altering, combinative, never fully resolved into a single experience.

 

"I bore / witness: your body" works the same way. Read across the full length of the caesura, both the speaker and the child become the one who bore witness. The word "bore" splits and reattaches, carrying both meanings simultaneously. And then: "eve. the period preceding some say wife / mother of [ ]." We are given Eve before motherhood, edenic, pre-dating her eventual absorption into someone else's lineage. The uncapitalization does quiet work by collapsing the proper name into the common noun, so that Eve and evening are twined, lending the moment a layer of ending, of anticipation, of something about to change. The empty brackets are pure potential. She begins in herself and is then permanently attached to another, to a name, to patrilineal history. Those brackets close around her. 

 

Ali often works within the ghazal tradition and uses it to hold the personal and collective in the same breath. In "Ghazal Ghazal," she asks: "Did my god not make his mouth, aural imprint of every remembered ghazal?" It's a question about whose voice gets to carry tradition forward, whose mouth the prayers were made for. The ghazal, with its repeated refrain and its tradition of the poet naming herself in the final couplet, gives her permission to be both Sarah and Sarah Ghazal Ali at the same time. The form itself is her argument. This inheritance belongs to her. She can inhabit and reshape it to her liking. Legacy is something daughters, too, can hold and mold in their hands.

 

Theophanies is a book that insists on existing inside the Abrahamic tradition so completely, yet on its own terms. For anyone who grew up raising their arms in exultation while mouthing along to words that didn't include them or even seem to think of them once, or for anyone who falls outside the religious tradition altogether, this book feels like an answer long overdue. With Sarah Ghazal Ali, daughters finally get to sing.

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