Review
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"Tommy Pico's epic poem is sad and funny and honest
and wickedly clever with rhymes and rhythms. It is an utterly
original aboriginal look at the world. I love it."―Sherman Alexie
"Pico's brilliant, funny, and musical book-length debut finds his
charming alter ego, Teebs, navigating the joys and difficulties
of being a queer hipster 'NDN' trans to New York City from a
California reservation. Teebs's lines channel a rush of Internet
slang and emoticons, run-on ramblings and sentence fragments, and
poppy lyrical bursts ('All of these Adams, / all of these Bens n
them/ Benz and Rolls Royce's'). He has a laundry list of beaux
with nicknames such as Big-Arms-Ugly-Face and Pompadour, but his
true beloved is an artist named Muse, 'whose / even slight squint
bursts/ me into high July.' Teebs agonizes over Muse's aloof
behavior, quandaries about text messages, and the resigned
admission that 'Museless, I'm useless.' He is ambivalent about
social media, denouncing the maudlin self-pitying Facebook posts
of friends while praising his own cleverness: 'I post a pic of
Pangea / on Insta for #tbt.' Though the poem exudes a summertime
party atmosphere, Teebs calls out acts of phobia as well as
atrocities committed against NDNs, from their forced conversion
by Spanish colonizers to the microaggressions of corporate
cultural appropriation. He also invokes Gertrude Stein and
Sherman Alexie as naturally as he does Beyoncé. Pico's skillful
rendering of Teebs's coming-of-age attempts to create a cohesive
identity out of his many selves proves to be entertaining,
enlightening, and utterly relatable in the age of the
.―Publishers Weekly Starred Review
"On the narrowing frontier between song & speech, memory &
oblivion, future & no future, Native & American, IRL is
Heraclitan, a river of text and sweat, whipping worlds into the
silence of white pages: a new masterpiece. And a new kind of
masterpiece. It's a lyric epic of desire whose hero renounces
heroism. & it's not he who voyages out in search of a world, but
rather the devastated worlds in his own blood that seek him out,
to mourn them. I said epic of desire and I meant it: desire of
every kind, for the infinite & the proximate, the fucking trite &
the tried-and-true― it's also a gorgeous monument, an act of
memory for the future of all longing, for the fact of roots and
the need for them, decolonizing poesis from the root without for
one second the condescension of even the notion of safety. For
the poem is also deeply canny, and weary; it knows 'There is no
post-colonial / America' and yet― the poem keeps pushing out from
under history, out beyond the poem's own billion negations, into
a space both beyond identity and deep with it."―Ariana Reines
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About the Author
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Tommy "Teebs" Pico was a Queer/Art/Mentors inaugural
fellow, a 2013 Lambda Literary fellow in poetry, and has poems in
BOMB, Guernica, and the Offing. Originally from the Viejas Indian
reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Brooklyn and
with Morgan Parker co-curates the reading series Poets With
Attitude (PWA).
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