Emily Austin’s Gay Girl Prayers is full of “strange women” behaving in ways that queer readers will find familiar. They make soup, exchange toad memes, ponder polyamory and check on their mutual exes, caring for each other in simple, radical ways.
Yet these women are deemed strange because they are estranged from God, due to their actions, desires and supposedly sinful insistence that their lives are beautiful and whole without men. Austin interrogates this estrangement in her debut poetry collection, an alternative prayer book where the strange inherit both heaven and earth.
The poems borrow their titles, subject matter, and structure from traditional biblical verse, often with only the lightest of edits. Austin might swap out a single word here and there to subvert meaning: replacing “faith” with “pride,” for example, or inverting gender binaries by capitalizing the pronoun “Her” to suggest a feminine creator.
The simplicity of some of these changes might run the risk of belying their subversive power. When Austin declares “Don’t forgive me / I haven’t sinned,” it’s a refusal to take on the burden of the Catholic Church’s disordered thinking. Rather than falling on our knees and asking to be saved, Gay Girl Prayers encourages us: “Stand on your feet.”
Austin’s poems burst with furious solidarity for her community of strangers. From “newborn enbies,” “baby gays,” and “trans kids” to “fairies,” “butches,” and “femmes,” she declares that “Every fruit is a blessing” and warns bigots and exclusionaries alike: “As you did it / to the strangest / of my sisters / you did it to me.”
Austin is not writing an inclusive version of the Bible. Instead, it’s as though she’s thumbing through each wafer-thin page with a figurative red pen, underlining logical fallacies and demanding answers from the text itself. In these moments, her poem titles serve as both citation and receipt; if women are casually called “the weaker vessel” in “1 Peter 3:7,” Austin throws the question back at Peter in an identically-titled poem, challenging him to “Name the vessel stronger / than the one that brought you / and every person who is / and ever was / to life.”
The poems, it must be said, are often bitingly fun and take great pleasure in queering the somber rigidity of the original scripture. Austin’s version of the Our Father prayer begins with the playful call “Hey Mamma / who art in a lesbian bar” and her poem “Romans 1:26-27 & Ruth 1:16,” which includes the line, “for wherever you go, I will U-Haul,” would make for some inspired sapphic wedding vows.
Austin dedicates the book to “anyone taught they were going to hell,” and those who didn’t grow up haunted by the holy ghost may find it hard to understand how prayers, gay or otherwise, could bring any comfort. But prayers are rituals, and rituals help us make meaning out of the pains and joys of life. By playing with biblical verse—the first poem-like things some of us ever heard, projected into incensed air as we fidgeted on hard wooden pews—perhaps we can change its
meaning, so that “Heaven is all strange people” and our bodies whole and holy as they are.