The Scorched Psalms, by Daniel Culver

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

The Scorched Psalms is a liturgy for the heretics, a gospel for those who find sacredness in ruin and redemption in desire. In these poems, Daniel Culver writes toward an unshackled divine—one that blossoms not in temples or texts, but in salt-laced skin, fungal sacrament, ecological collapse, and the breath between lovers. It’s a collection of ecstatic resistance, of whispered prayers in the ruins of theology, and of wild devotions to the Earth, the body, and the sacred feminine long buried beneath doctrine.

With language both visceral and mythic, these poems reject sanitized salvation in favor of raw, incarnate praise. Here, fig and flame, psalm and skin, grief and eros converge into a cycle of sacrament and protest. The Scorched Psalms is a text for those who have worshipped from the margins—and who remember, in their very bones, the feel of holy ground.

Daniel Culver is a Texas based poet whose work explores ecological mysticism, ancestral memory, and spiritual subversion. His writing appears in print and online, and his chapbook Bones of the Earth was published by Alien Buddha Press in May 2025. He is currently developing several poetry projects that navigate the intersections of myth, earthbound mysticism, and embodied gnosis.