THEOPHANIES
poems, Sarah Ghazal Ali
Alice James Books, 2024
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At the intersection of accidental and borrowed dialogues, there exists a holiness uncovered as a pre-existing condition and it’s there you may find Sarah Ghazal Ali’s poems as they have been carried into and out of, as they have been consoled for and cared for within, the collection Theophanies. These are musics of temporary permanence, and I now, as you soon, will not refrain from our mild but wholly offered singing. Precious and profane, mistake and miracle, these poems know praise as theft and ask the body to unfollow its gut. As a reader, I am always struck by loss in a way that makes me present, and, while I was struck no less different in the open places that Ghazal Ali closes with their housed verse, the queried losses made a trinity of new interrogations. The first loss of a language that uses sound to be seen, the double loss of birth, and the past loss of being given a name you can’t be called. I was present and was also soon to be made present. By its end, its beginning had restarted the proxy resurrections of its revelations, and I plainly understood and beautifully misunderstood what it meant or did not mean to be under those lowest gods that gift clay to any prayerful form bent from its time as a shape. Theophanies is a vessel that travels unveiled in a vision all should have.
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reflection by Barton Smock
kingsoftrain 
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