muttology — tinypistol

MUTTOLOGY—the study of being a mutt—archives a life lived in the in-between-ness of race and identity. Maurya Kerr's mixed-race, light-skinned blackness offers her privilege and safety in a violently anti-black world; it has also meant belonging nowhere. This collection looks at the countless ways of being and blackness in the world, and defines individuality beyond monolithic assumptions of what “authentic” blackness is. This collection also explores the price and rage, then and now, of being a (black) woman in the domain of (white) men. In MUTTOLOGY, Kerr locates the slippages between belonging and exclusion, interior experience and external appearance, longing and refusal.

I have to say in the beginning I was deathly afraid to comment on MUTTOLOGY – or even how could I? I have only ever known dark skin, and dark parents – but have a notion (unpopular in certain circles) that all Blackness in America, being constantly warped by whiteness – if not genetically, then in other abstracts (socially, economically, geographically) and this constant strain renders us all Tragic Mulatto – albeit all to frighteningly different effects – depending on the players. Being a Southerner, I am of course, no stranger to the “One Drop” rule – of course this is eugenics satire, but the fact remains that even a drop contains the infinite. That said, the constant through line in this anthology of course is rage, and the voice takes an unapologetic tone as such – the kind of battle made evident by the fact that Blackness (in America a seemingly fixed identity) poetically allows for Whiteness (whiteness, in accordance to natural law, gets to be anything it goddamn wants). Kerr’s collection seems set in documenting the perilous fault lines where these things neither compromise or complement the other. This collection creates its own silo – a pressure valve, where these two unlike things become combustible and explode.

Brontez Purnell (author of 100 Boyfriends)

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)