"Emily Austin's collection Gay Girl Prayers is both funny and important, riffing on Bible verses to create a new queer classic. A beautiful, moving declaration of pride supported by a surprisingly deep interrogation and investigation of Scripture, Austin reproduces the lyrical logic of the Bible to proclaim and reclaim queer resistance and joy against the rise of a hostile Christofascist culture. Expertly focused, and a book that judiciously says only what it needs to, this collection is both succour and supplication; it borrows holiness from every quarter and offers up to readers a feast of queer joy and liberation. It is irrepressible, irreverent, and impossible to separate from the tender affirmations and full-hearted witnessing of deeply connected queer relationships." --from the jurors of the Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry " Gay Girl Prayers offers a template for queer resistance to religious doctrine in revised Bible verses. Emily Austin has forged an unholy hymnal, a book of praise songs that shuck off stuffy Christian constraints to embrace instead unrepentant joy. She redefines Heaven not as a place for the puritanical, but rather a series of intimate moments between queer girls 'who take lamps to one another's bed chambers' and reimagines, through erotic apocrypha, divinity inclusive of 'the curious.the closeted.
the butches.the femmes.bisexuals, pansexuals.all queer trans people.' Gay Girl Prayers is a renunciation of orthodoxy, a proclamation of queer solidarity, and a celebration of self-love." --Evelyn Berry, author of Grief Slut and Buggery "Emily Austin's debut book of poems is the most inventive and hilarious collection I've come across in years. Gay Girl Prayers manages to be both cohesive and innovative in form. I wanted to run a highlighter over so many lines, feeling both moved and delighted by this epic translation and reclamation project.
It's both fun and challenging, my favourite kind of text." --Zoe Whittall, author of The Fake and The Best Kind of People "The Holy Spirit within them leaps for joy in this queer parable, as the girls find love, intimacy, and community with one another. For many lesbians, including myself, it was a satisfying revision, as we often receive comments that we have not met the right man yet or claims from different men that they can turn us straight. Instead, Austin argues that the women are what they are waiting for, a prophetic theme tied to a divine She." --Emma Cieslik, New Ways Ministry ,.