Gay Girl Prayers by Emily Austin

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.

Praise for Gay Girl Prayers:

“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

Jury Citations:

“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