No Billboard Gospel - Paperback

by Emma Galloway Stephens (Author)

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.