tommy noun

• tommy noun
• Price: $13.00
• ISBN 978-1-949540-41-3
• March 15, 2024
• Poetry - PB
• Pages - 44
• Maurya Kerr

AWARDS

C&R Press Winter Soup Bowl 2022 Chapbook Selection

ABOUT

“tommy  noun.” employs familiar systems of knowledge and construction—grammar, dictionary, myth, legacy—as anchor to speak to the death of someone too young. What happens when sorrow deluges the capacity, the rules, of comprehension? This collection attempts to write itself into understanding and grace, in the voices of the mourning and the mourned, both human and animal.

PRAISE FOR tommy noun.

“Maurya Kerr’s ‘tommy noun.’ is about grief and motherhood, love and death, but mostly it’s about how love encompasses everything else. Its remarkable use of the lyrical voice mesmerizes even as it horrifies. Yes, love is this powerful, all-consuming, and unforgiving. Kerr manages to do the impossible: to imagine the unimaginable. This is a very accomplished work of the imagination, and an equally moving one.”
—Philip Schultz, 2008 Pulitzer Prize winner for Failure

“We don’t need tom toms (drums or navigation systems) to make our way through the terrain of Maurya Kerr’s ‘tommy noun.’ All we have to do is allow ourselves to be lost in the rise and fall of narrative and form, the struggles of loss, and the triumph of poetry to be a site of witness and memory. In ‘tommy noun.’ attention is paid to the transformative and shape-shifting characteristics of an English lexicon. Language is sextant where we sight the horizon, measure constellations and witness the peril of the voyage. Verbs, nouns, adjectives are itemized; they become a way of documentation, a manner of seeing. When I journey through this collection I become cognizant of poetry’s ability to speak on multiple levels, to dance with narrative and ways of being. Kerr works a kind of alchemy of form and presents a potent primer that simultaneously orients and disorients. This is necessary reading!”
—T. J. Anderson III, author of Devonte Travels the Sorry Route