the anonym gospels

Em J Parsley's 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 us through a transition point that we as readers bear witness to: from dogma to questioning, from questioning to fear, from fear to resolution, and what comes after this reckoning: the apocryphal gospel. The good news that these poems have to offer is bittersweet: we must confront the painfully stark realities of loving a place and people that often try to deny our existence, but there is tenderness and care to be found (and created) in that landscape. Parsley interrogates constructed binaries of legitimacy-hetero vs. queer, canonical vs. apocryphal-and ultimately asks us to join them on the "illegitimate" side of that binary.