Forward Prizes 2025 | ‘Theophanies’: a reading list

Our final shortlistee for the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection is Sarah Ghazal Ali, who has generously shared some of the books which were especially important to her while writing her nominated debut Theophanies (the87 press).

 

While drafting the poems that would become my debut collection Theophanies, I was porous, searching everywhere for language in which to locate my own literary lineage. Theophanies explores matrilineage, gendered violence, and womanhood through the shifting prisms of faith and doubt as well as scriptural and contemporary women. Through fixed and inventive forms, I worked to conjure Sarah, my namesake and the so-called ‘Mother of Nations,’ curious about her agency and how her life – as well as those of other women in scripture – might make mine more possible, bearable. The texts that became touchstones for me were lush with music, mystery, and voice. As a poet drawn to the vehicles of persona and portraiture, it was voice above all that struck me and returned me replenished to the page. In each of these collections, I hope you’ll find, as I have, a distinctive, peculiar voice that rings in your ear, poem after poem, probing and altogether bewildering. 

If I Were Another by Mahmoud Darwish
Rife with questions, transformations, and exclamations, If I Were Another is a selection of Darwish’s later work that models how to explode meaning, how to tease it and take it apart. His long poems are epic in scope and scale; ‘Eleven Planets at the End of the Andalusian Scene’ in particular widened the possibilities of what a poem can do, and where it can go, both forward and backward in time. Darwish strikes a remarkable balance between conversation and lyric, self and other, music and mythology, all in service of a home in letters for the exiled. 

Deluge by Leila Chatti
I think of Deluge as an older sister to Theophanies – it reached me at just the right time in 2020, when I was overwhelmed and uncertain about the worthiness of the project. In Deluge, Chatti explores shame, faith, and the body through the lens of illness and survival, and often invokes the figure of Mary to ask: what does it mean to inhabit a female body that bleeds when Mary is revered for immaculate conception? Chatti’s command over the line as a unit of meaning is astounding, and her speaker(s) throughout the book are fierce and resilient. 

Incarnadine by Mary Szybist 
Incarnadine obsessively returns, remakes, and reconfigures the Annunciation, the moment in scripture when the angel Gabriel descends upon Mary to bring news of the child in her womb. This inventive book is full of encounters and confrontations, and is as much about the divine and iconic as it is about the intimacy of an ordinary – or devastating – personal experience. Every poem takes on a mythic quality that I found deeply instructive. Mary’s obsession with her namesake gave me permission to continue spiraling with curiosity into mine. 
  
The Book of Questions by Edmond Jabès 
This book is difficult to describe – meditative and inquisitive (as the title suggests), Jabès has created a singular text about texts, about the word and what we as mankind are to do with the word, and with language, and with scripture: ‘What is the story of the book?’ It’s aphoristic and mysterious, and, like Darwish, steeped in the language of exile. Polyphonic and propulsive, the book loosely centers on the characters of Sarah and Yukel, but meanders, wanders, and interrupts itself throughout. I found myself engaging with it as if through bibliomancy, often flipping through and beginning reading wherever my finger fell. 

Magdalene by Marie Howe 
Magdalene is a masterclass in persona, a collection written in the voice of a contemporary Mary Magdalene. This Magdalene is a mother, speaking in spare, minimally punctuated poems, and given the space to really inhabit her interiority as a woman with humour, clarity and grief. Howe can do in four short lines what I need four pages to accomplish. Magdalene takes what little is known of a real woman and reanimates her from the margins, positioning her on the page outside of an expected narrative. Each poem leaps in surprising ways. 

Sarah Ghazal Ali is the author of Theophanies, published by The 87 Press. See all the books on the Forward Prize shortlists here.