the anonym gospels

Praise for Em J Parsley

“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