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.
ADVANCED PRAISE
"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