the anonym gospels
winner of the 2024 Apogee Chapbook Award || April Gloaming Publishing, 2024
the anonym gospels explores faith—and the longing for faith after the loss of it—through the lens of a queer Appalachian “gospel” in the Greek sense of the word: “good news.” Told in four parts, each gospel takes the reader through a transition point in the narrator’s life: from dogma to questioning, from questioning to fear, from fear to resolution, and what comes after: the apocryphal gospel.
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Praise for the anonym gospels
"Em J Parsley’s the anonym gospels is an inwardly expansive chapbook of poems. Parsley’s speaker comes to us tenderly from a landscape of haphazard violence: 'The body is not made / for thinness, nor is it made for preservation.' Reading this book is like walking toward a soft light in which we shed our own certainty with every step closer. 'I love / you now and I / would have loved you then.' Follow the poet Em J Parsley—his poems welcome and warm the dark of us."
— C.T. Salazar, author of Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking
"'What we say when we want / a hand to hold is not unreasonable.' Em J Parsley has written a book I wish I could send back in time, 40 years ago to my evangelical Tennessee tomboy barely-hanging-on heart. It has been too long since I experienced this transcendence of language at its most honest, which is to say names that are exact in their namelessness: boy-girl-other, mudslush, empty air above the rows where the corn cobs used to breathe. Like any good news that is true, the anonym gospels hold grief and beauty, connection and rupture, the earthly and the ethereal in one open hand. Here is a book that would save so many queer and trans youth (and adults) from the hell of aloneness that results from being told the divine can’t live inside us. Reaching and full of grace, this should be required reading in the churches of open fields, all across the south."
— TC Tolbert, author of Gephyromania and The Quiet Practices
"The radical potential of queer, visionary love has reinterpreted the gospel through the light of contradiction. May we all be saved from the hell of binary oppositions. May we all be delivered into the kingdoms of our multivalence. Em J Parsley’s the anonym gospels is a lyrical hymn that is both lamentation and celebration. It shows us the way."
— HR Hegnauer, author of Sir and When the Bird is Not a Human