מאת Tommy Pico
A Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
From the Winner of the Whiting Award, an American Book Award, and finalist for a Lambda, Tommy Pico's Feed is the final book in the Teebs Cycle.
Feed is the fourth book in the Teebs tetralogy. It's an epistolary recipe for the main character, a poem of nourishment, and a jaunty walk through New York's High Line park, with the lines, stanzas, paragraphs, dialogue, and registers approximating the park's cultivated gardens of wildness. Among its questions, Feed asks what's the difference between being alone and being lonely? Can you ever really be friends with an ex? How do you make perfect mac & cheese? Feed is an ode of reconciliation to the wild inconsistencies of a northeast spring, a frustrating season of back-and-forth, of thaw and blizzard, but with a faith that even amidst the mess, it knows where it's going.A Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
From the Winner of the Whiting Award, an American Book Award, and finalist for a Lambda, Tommy Pico's Feed is the final book in the Teebs Cycle.
Feed is the fourth book in the Teebs tetralogy. It's an epistolary recipe for the main character, a poem of nourishment, and a jaunty walk through New York's High Line park, with the lines, stanzas, paragraphs, dialogue, and registers approximating the park's cultivated gardens of wildness. Among its questions, Feed asks what's the difference between being alone and being lonely? Can you ever really be friends with an ex? How do you make perfect mac & cheese? Feed is an ode of reconciliation to the wild inconsistencies of a northeast spring, a frustrating season of back-and-forth, of thaw and blizzard, but with a faith that even amidst the mess, it knows where it's going.ביקורות-
-
Starred review from July 15, 2019
In the riveting fourth installment of Pico’s imaginative tetralogy, food, music, sex, and the void serve as means to reveal and dissect the speaker’s interior life. Stepping outside of his alter ego persona, Teebs, to wonder about the possibility of a “true self,” Pico resists the obvious narrative and claims that Teebs, perhaps, is more real than himself. The speaker declares himself a “recipe” made of the ingredients of his past and his family, defined by the intergenerational trauma of Native American genocide and displacement. His Native identity is both an albatross and an amulet of protection: “My spirits surround me like a cloud of disapproving aunties, keeping most of you at bay.” Amid the purposeful cacophony and confusion the poet throws at the reader, exacerbated by a lack of punctuation and erratic changes in line length, there are moments of stunning beauty: “What a better time than in the face/ of spring and the spring/ ephemerals—a bloom/ so/ short/ it puts the fleet in ‘fleeting feeling.’ ” Readers familiar with Pico’s work will find continuity from previous volumes; the poet’s present concerns and ongoing obsessions are proffered in a seemingly stream-of-consciousness format that is actually meticulously well-organized. New readers, as well, can easily dive in. -
November 1, 2019
The fourth book in the Teebs tetralogy (Junk, 2018; Nature Poem, 2017; IRL, 2016) is one freewheeling, semi-stream-of-consciousness poem that follows its predecessors in its book-length format, spanning a wide array of subjects, from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego to the Greek k�smos, with many stops along the way. Pico includes a preface that situates the work along the High Line of New York City?the abandoned elevated railway converted into park space?with its cultivated gardens of wildness? a fitting description of the author's approach to poetry, with it's quick shifts in style and form, including snippets of dialogue, pronunciation guides, social commentary, and more. If anything coheres the collection, it's an incessant, remarkable wit, evident on nearly every page ("A hot person farts on the tarmac and gets super embarrassed and I'm like this is what it sounds like when doves cry"). Pico's lyrics may strike readers as unconventional in terms of the traditional Western canon, but they are forged in and speak urgently to a twenty-first-century audience. Another powerhouse collection from this incredibly prolific new voice in poetry.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.) - The New York Times Restless, intimate and exhilarating.
- O, The Oprah Magazine Feed, Pico's latest collection. . . will stop you in your tracks.
- Shelf Awareness A dazzling fusion of culture. Feed is as much about what we consume as how we consume. Pico's lines are ever-growing, ever-expanding. And while we might seem lost in the abundance, the sheer variety, Pico is a skilled enough poet to ground us. ... How Pico pulls all this off is his magic. Feed is engrossing, oddly enlightening and, above all, fun to read.
- Tommy Orange, author of There There Funny, irreverent, profound. This book is an ode to love and language and food and what right now sounds like. It's also a meditation on what it means to belong on/to this planet/universe. Delivered in headlines, texts, conversations, song lyrics, puns, rhymes, and speculation about the possibility of life on other planets, Tommy Pico's Feed sprawls across time and this country. It is endlessly inventive and stays fun while bringing the heat and weight of a world we're all helplessly watching burn down. As his character/AKA Teebs says of Oakland rapper Two $hort, the same is true of Tommy Pico in this book and in general: Vigor is the art he argues for.
- Danez Smith, author of Homie Tommy Pico's Feed is the poet's most ambitious work yet. Part tour diary, part tracklist, part play, part by part Pico tops his epic run of books off with this gut-wrenching, gut-busting, gutter mouth offering of a body in lust, in isolation, in danger, in memory, in future and all the transits between. Feed is a feast of Pico's signature intellect, humor, and linguistic demolition—all sharper than ever. No one corrals our day's chaos like Pico, who serves it up to us as some of the wildest verse the world has ever seen. Bon appétit, bitches.
- D.A. Powell, author of Useless Landscape, Or A Guide for Boys Tommy Pico is indiscreet, rambunctious, spunky and operatic, on the page and off, a dynamo, a force, a one-man band with one hand behind his back and the other setting a guitar on fire. I feel utterly consumed by his poems, absolutely smitten. This is poetry that makes you sweat.
- Fatimah Asghar, author of If They Come For Us Feed is an incredibly study in chaos, a plunge into the hectic mind disrupted by headlines that scream tragedy and demand our attention. Pico's use of language insists on carving space for a new quotidian, in bluntly grappling with the ways we use words on the daily, breaking and re-making the art of poetry. This book is inventive, wild, fresh, urgent—spanning the author at their most vulnerable and their fiercest. Pico is at the forefront of a new poetics, blazing an unchartable trail that we should all attempt to follow. Surrender to the wild friends, for we are in it, and Pico has us by the tips of our tongues.
- New York Journal of Books A brilliant contemplation of love seen through the lenses of food, pop culture, and raw emotion.
