no billboard gospel
by emma galloway stephens
No Billboard Gospel is a book of poems for every reader who has ever asked the question, “If God exists and if he is good, then how can he permit evil?” Its poems follow its speaker on a thorny red clay path through a season of severe doubt. Its Southern landscape of rivers, bogs, mountaintops, and kudzu-choked forests provide a gothic backdrop for her spiritual quest driven by an insatiable "Godhunger." The language of drought and storms reflect the all-consuming nature of following God. The speaker desires to drown in God, to crawl hand over fist toward him, hungry for truth and transformation. But even as the speaker reaches toward the Divine, anger holds her back: anger at the world's growing darkness, the crumbling of its once-trustworthy institutions, and its commodification of faith. No Billboard Gospel yearns for restoration: of personal faith, of community, and of the broken—but still beautiful—world.
praise for no billboard gospel
These are stunning poems of “Godhunger,” and doubt, flood and drought, praise and rage—no easy devotional exercises as the poet climbs “bloodykneed toward the Lord,” both bereft and filled with grace. Emma Galloway Stephens writes about holiness that is taxing and magnificent.
— Jill Peláez Baumgaertner, poetry editor, The Christian Century
In No Billboard Gospel, Emma Galloway Stephens sees the unseeable—a poet’s charge—alive with ache and trembling. She beckons us forward with a power kin to her grandmother’s buckwheat-and-butter spells, biscuits rising like small miracles. With these feral hard-won truths she wakes us with wonder and witness.
—Glenis Redmond, author of Over Yonder: A Poet’s Exploration of South Carolina State Parks, Part II
In No Billboard Gospel, the poems of Emma Galloway Stephens inhabit a landscape of red clay, summer heat, winding rivers, and lonely highways. They are astonishing visions of a New South remembering its past and beyond, back to the Holy Land, back to the Whirlwind.
—Steven Peterson, author of Walking Trees and Other Poems
From a place “waist deep where no angel can follow,” Emma Galloway Stephens eschews the dumbed-down platitudes of billboard gospel to proclaim the joys of a life lived in faith and rich in family, prayer, and truth. These skillfully crafted poems perch at the nexus of earth
and spirit.
—Richard Allen Taylor, author, Letters to Karen Carpenter and Other Poems
about the author
Emma Galloway Stephens is a poet and professor from the Appalachian foothills of South Carolina. She writes poems for many reasons—instinct, impulse, joy—but ultimately sees her work as an outpouring of her faith in Christ. Her poems have appeared in The Windhover, The Christian Century, Door is a Jar, The MacGuffin, and many others. She lives with her spouse, Samuel, in upstate South Carolina.