DESCRIPTION
Winner of Button Poetry’s 2023 Chapbook Contest, Smut Psalm is a queer coming-of-age, equally drenched in religious guilt and eroticism.
​
Smut Psalm’s poems reckon with self-discovery and sexual curiosity–interspersed with “Church Board Interrogation” interludes, which act as a dialogue between a homophobic church voice and a witty, increasingly defiant poetic speaker.
​
Smut Psalm shapes the raw messiness of queer adolescence into its own kind of holiness.
"Fruit Heels" by Wojciech Wos
Cover Design by Coral Black
"What a little book of gems, finely made, multifaceted poems of growing up gay. Just a boy, looking at the world through a hollowed out cucumber, rubbing his father’s vast back with lotion, the spot he can’t quite reach, his dreams and desires. Tvrdy’s hand is steady, his gaze intent, his heart wide open, his answers to the Church Board’s interrogations skewed but painfully, humorously, truthful."
​
—Dorianne Laux
Pulitzer Prize Finalist and author of Life on Earth
"On the threshold between father and son in this stunning come-of-age sequence is the child's fantasy of giving voice to his sexual imagination before his inquisitors—the godlike voices of intergenerational religious abuse.
The wisdom of the smut psalmist is also the mature lyric of the queer poet, who baffles and skirts and faces the punishers while singing songs the child knew to be true: that shame is a den of vipers. That a beloved father may be lost among them. That holiness can come violently unhinged, at a touch or a sound that breaks silence. That we all long for tenderness. That longing is as human as it is holy."
​
—Gina Franco
Author of The Accidental​​
"The sensual, wounded poems of SMUT PSALM are filled with shower steam, fluids, and sanctification.
Josh Tvrdy, 'tightest with Titus,' witty in tighty-whities, ritualistically undoes ideas of queer cleanliness: “nothing // gets a God-stain out.” I admire the daring of this interrogation; I feel, by the end, “a little ashamed, a little amazed.”
​
—Randall Man
Author of Deal: New and Selected Poems
​