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Book Review: God's Boy by Andrew Hahn

God’s Boy
Andrew Hahn
Sibling Rivalry Press
2019
978-1-943977-69-7
35 pages
$12


Andrew Hahn is a queer poet and writer living in Fort Lauderdale. He has his MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and was invited to be the writer-in-residence at Randolph College. His poetry and essays can be found online at Screen Door Review, Butter Press, Crab Fat Magazine, Crab Creek Review, and Pithead Chapel among others. 


Review





















A Review of Andrew Hahn's God's Boy

Andrew Hahn’s God’s Boy highlights its subject’s body on the line between condemnation and pleasure, using eroticism to queer hyper-masculine Christian traditions. Hahn’s poems apply Christian ritual and worship in order to reveal different interpretations of biblical teachings to show poetry’s position in changing the perspective of dominant society’s values and beliefs. 
 
In Hahn’s titular piece, the poem begins with an informing epigraph: “liberty university is the world’s largest evangelical university.” The setting implies an intimidating authority for queer people, and yet Hahn prevails to deliver a collection of confessional poems that don’t ask for absolution. “God’s boy” narrates a forewarning from a “pastor emerick,” who heralds: “you don’t want to be a dad/dy’s boy […] / you’re God’s boy.” The speaker thinks: “dad/dies call twinks boy in the videos i love.” The repentance of “God,” “dad/dy,” and “boy” throughout the piece focuses on roles between dominant and submissive figures. Although “boy” answers to both “God” and “dad/dy,” Hahn demonstrates explicit thrill in the submissive role: “if only God knew how it felt to worship.” Supposing “boy” falls under a submissive category, the poem’s perspective of “boy” is by no means a passive role. The speaker privileges “boy’s” arousal, and absorbs the active act of language, dominating the presence of those who stand over “boy’s” body.  
 
Throughout God’s Boy, Hahn reproduces biblical characters, transforming them into familial characters to represent the relationships between the subject and God as well as the subject and his father. In “a faggot tries to be christ-like,” the piece likens God and Jesus to a father and son:
 
 
w the way my father sometimes looks at me
i bet he would love to drive nails
into my limp faggoty wrists
 
was it God who tortured & hung his son on the tree
jesus begged    sweat blood
& the father said     i’m going to kill you anyway
was it God who whispered to the roman soldier
            to pierce jesus’ side
In connecting Jesus to a gay son and God to a homophobic father, the sacrificial offering centers on suffering instead of salvation, as if to erase the holiness of the biblical significance. Furthermore, Hahn reasons the social phenomenon of homophobic fathers disowning their gay sons as deriving from the crucifixion of Christ: “is this how the church creates gods from men.” Hahn’s poem reimagines the crucifixion to rationalize society’s centuries of homophobic social conditions, disclosing a reflexive analogy between history and present.
 
Moreover, Hahn’s God’s Boy further discusses the creation of social categorizations, investigating the semiotics of the recurring word “faggot.” Interestingly, in “boys like us,” the poem doesn’t intentionally use the word “faggot,” but represents the word through metaphor and analogy:
he doesn’t know these people used to burn boys like us at the stakes
& gave us our name     bundles for burning
 
i am not afraid of the fire that named me

The piece assumes the reader is familiar with the etymology of the word “faggot” from its beginnings to “bundles for burning” to “our name.” In discarding fear, the poem subverts the violent connotations engendered in the word, and instead accepts the “name” as such. Hahn’s poem teeters between the implicit and the explicit as the images of immolation describe the violence against queer people, while the poem speaks to true events:
when these people set us ablaze
would they see God standing w us in the fire
like nebudchadnezzar burning the three boys

Hahn’s “boys like us” denotes the history of violence of the gay slur, while reclaiming the term to revert connotative power of language to the people who “faggot” claims to define.
 
Andrew Hahn’s God’s Boy worships poetic craft for its ability to confess the conflict between queerness and Christian tradition, situating language as the tool and space for reclaiming stolen power. Hahn’s explicit use of eroticism reveals an epistemology for queer people navigating marginalizing environments, using the past to subvert dominant social conditions based on gender and sexual discrimination. In “the river: schroon lake,” the speaker contemplates, “i imagined how a home can be beautiful after Hell devastates it"; and, it is the poem’s meditation the collection transgresses. God’s Boy depicts a close intimacy with violence, and yet enkindles the beauty of queer people, their survival, and their pilgrimage to a home of healing and of unrepentant love. 

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Miguel is a Lewis University alum. He is the Book Review Editor for Jet Fuel Review. He has been published in 30N, EFNIKS, Rogue Agent, The Rising Phoenix Review among other places. He is a fellow of the Wolny Writing Residency. He also writes for the Jet Fuel Review blog: Not Your Binary: A QTPOC Reading Column.
​​

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  • Home
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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
      • Camilla Taylor Fall 2021
      • Guilherme Bergamini Fall 2021
      • Emanuela Iorga Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
      • Annah Browning Fall 2021
      • Romana Iorga Fall 2021
      • Natalie Hampton Fall 2021
      • Sherine Gilmour Fall 2021
      • Adam Day Fall 2021
      • Amanda Auchter Fall 2021
      • Adam Tavel Fall 2021
      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
      • Daniel Zhang Fall 2021
      • Erika Lutzner Fall 2021
      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
      • Andrew Zawacki Fall 2021
      • Micah Ruelle Fall 2021
      • Rachel Stempel Fall 2021
      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
      • Rikki Santer Fall 2021
      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
      • Danielle Rose Fall 2021
      • Eric Burgoyne Fall 2021
      • John Cullen Fall 2021
      • Maureen Seaton Fall 2021
      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
      • Kevin Grauke Fall 2021
      • Courtney Justus Fall 2021
      • Amy Nicholson Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Fiction Fall 2021 >
      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
      • David Obuchowski Fall 2021
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      • Aiden Baker Fall 2021
      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
      • Karyna McGlynn Spring 2022
      • Andrea Kowch Spring 2022
      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
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      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
      • Cody Beck Spring 2022
      • Danyal Kim Spring 2022
      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
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      • Audrey T. Carroll Spring 2022
  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
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      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
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