I have the pleasure of being a guest reader
for the virtual book launch of Maurya Kerr’s new collection MUTTOLOGY
Maurya Kerr’s debut chapbook MUTTOLOGY is a wry, unflinching look at mixed race positionality that begins with a historical story about sexual violence and ends with the speaker’s wish for “every creature I have loved, still love.” In between, the poems answer the perpetual and derogatory question: What are you? with stories and declarations: about learning a long poem by heart during a brutally cold midwestern winter, about being mistaken for Greek on a date (“I tell him I hate kalamata olives, love feta / cheese”), about the elder who won’t move her bag from the one unoccupied seat on the bus, and about messy sex and its messier aftermath. There are so many things to want in this universe, “but tonight I want to torch piggy’s house of sticks,” Kerr’s speaker insists. MUTTOLOGY is defiant from beginning to end; it spits rhymes and lights fires and looks to the stars.
—Chiyuma Elliott, author of Blue in Green