Gay Girl Prayers

by Emily Austin

Overview

CBC Best Poetry Book 2024

A collection of poetry reclaiming Catholic prayers and biblical passages to empower girls, women, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community.

The extreme level of sass in Emily Austin's Gay Girl Prayers does not mean that this collection is irreverent. On the contrary, in rewriting Bible verses to affirm and uplift queer, feminist, and trans realities, Austin invites readers into a giddy celebration of difference and a tender appreciation for the lives and perspectives of "strange women."

Packed with zingy one liners, sexual innuendo, self-respect, U-Hauling, and painfully earnest declarations of love, this is gayness at its best, harnessed to a higher purpose and ready to fight the powers that be.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771316224
Publisher:	Brick Books
Publication date:	03/01/2024
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Emily Austin currently resides in Ottawa/the territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation. She is the author of the novel, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, which was longlisted for The Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award, and a finalist for the Ottawa Book Award. She studied Library Sciences, English Literature, and Religious Studies at King's University College and Western University.

Editorial Reviews

"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

"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

From the Publisher