Description
Button Poetry, paperback
Publication Date: December 3, 2024
Publisher Marketing:
Winner of Button Poetry’s 2023 Chapbook Contest, Josh Tvrdy’s 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. Altogether, Tvrdy crafts an intimate, surreal spectacle. Smut Psalm shapes the raw messiness of queer adolescence into its own kind of holiness. Charming and intoxicating, Tvrdy’s Smut Psalm is a strange, sinewy experience that can’t be missed.
In this stunning come-of-age, shame is a den of vipers—a beloved father may be lost among them. Holiness can come violently unhinged, at a touch or a sound. We all long for tenderness. Longing is as human as it is holy.
–Gina Franco, The Accidental
What a little book of gems. 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. Tvrdy’s hand is steady, gaze intent, heart wide open—painfully, but humorously, truthful.
–Dorianne Laux, Only as the Day Is Long
These smut psalms render the spectrum of desire. Family, religion, kink, home, and queer agency are singular forces, but they also touch, overlap. Playfulness is a survival strategy and a craft.
–Eduardo C. Corral, Guillotine
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