Emily Austin, Gay Girl Prayers

 

Lot’s unnamed daughters had an unnamed mother.
She was turned to salt for looking backwards.
At nighttime, before the girls slept,
they must have talked about her.
“Should we keep her salty body?”
“How will we remember her without pictures?”
“Cameras don’t exist yet.”
Maybe they hummed songs she sang,
or made recipes she taught them.
Maybe she saw her in their dreams,
or wrote poems about her face and wonders.
Could girls write back then?
How did they remember her?
How do we remember them? 

Spit on the ground,
Put the mud in your eyes. 

JOHN 9:1-12 

As part of the recent shortlist reading for this year’s Archibald Lampman Award, Ottawa writer Emily Austin spoke of composing the poems that became her full-length poetry debut, Gay Girl Prayers (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2024), while simultaneously working on what would become the first novel, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead (2021). These were poems, she said, but she didn’t necessarily presume anyone would be interested in reading them. The poems of Gay Girl Prayers, each of which are titled after each specific chapter and verse source, exist as a reclamation, set as responses through her own Biblical studies and Catholic upbringing. “Take the stones you plan to throw at her / for not screaming,” she writes, to rework “Deuteronomy 12:23-27,” “or not screaming loudly enough / while she was raped / put them inside of your pockets / and walk on water [.]” As she said at the event, she didn’t think of these as poems per se, or herself as a poet, and instead focused on two further novels (with another forthcoming), all of which appear with Atria Books and Simon & Schuster Canada: Interesting Facts About Space (2023), We Could Be Rats (2025) and Is This a Cry for Help? (due to appear in January 2026). What she composed as her own playful sketch-notes responding to some of the Bible’s darker elements, then, were temporarily set aside. “Your mother came named from her mother’s womb / and returned there gutted,” the poem “Job 1:21” writes, “Cover yourself in a golden chamois / return to the forest adorned [.]”

Gay Girl Prayers, as the copy for the collection informs, is a “collection of poetry reclaiming Catholic prayers and biblical passages to empower girls, women, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community,” a curious blend prompted by, among other factors, the fact that her author biography provides that she “studied English literature, religious studies, and library science at King’s University College and Western University.” The poems of Gay Girl Prayers, quite literally, work to reclaim agency against certain Biblical language, especially those elements too often cherry-picked and weaponized. “Heaven is ten girls / who take their lamps / to one another’s bed chambers / to light their rooms /until they sleep.” writes a short poem near the beginning, the title set at the end as a footnote, rewriting “Matthew 23:1.” These are poems translated away from weaponization or shame, away from the suggestion that any of God’s creatures, so to speak, as they truly are, has any less value than any other. These are poems of reclamation and biting humour, attempting a kind of play through translation, comparable in form to other book-length poetry-projects such as bpNichol’s Translating Translating Apollinaire: A Preliminary Report (1969) or Derek Beaulieu’s THE NEWSPAPER (2013), but with a far different and more specific intent, approaching the source material as something that requires adaptation beyond simple translation, however the approach. Far too often, Biblical text is approached as unironic, pure fact instead of as a living, breathing text; a series of book-length metaphor texts, lessons that should be held as guidelines for approaching thought, instead of a bludgeon with which to weaponize. Through Gay Girl Poems, scripture offers a new way of approaching text, some of which sit as koans, one to a page. In Gay Girl Poems, Austin has allowed her own responses, turns, and twists to open up new possibilities through antiquated language, and antiquated thinking. Or, as the poem “Exodus 22:18 & Isaiah 43:2” ends:

Read the lines in your palms.
Ask the stars: ask the dead.
Fortune tellers know
thou shalt relish a witch to live.