Staff Pick
Tommy Pico's IRL is a poem written in a newfound form, the text message. You probably won't ever receive anything this long in your DMs, but IRL feels just as emotional as receiving a heartfelt text from a dear friend. With musical rhythm and gut-punching humor, IRLis a personal yet relatable poem delivered to you, the reader, straight from Pico's brilliant mind. Recommended By Alex Y., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Poetry. Native American Studies. LGBT Studies. IRL is a sweaty, summertime poem composed like a long text message, rooted in the epic tradition of A.R. Ammons, ancient Kumeyaay Bird Songs, and Beyoncé's visual albums. It follows Teebs, a reservation-born, queer NDN weirdo, trying to figure out his impulses/desires/history in the midst of Brooklyn rooftops, privacy in the age of the Internet, street harassment, suicide, boys boys boys, literature, colonialism, religion, leaving one's 20s, and a love/hate relationship with English. He's plagued by an indecision, unsure of which obsessions, attractions, and impulses are essentially his, and which are the result of Christian conversion, hetero- patriarchal/colonialist white supremacy, homophobia, Bacardi, gummy candy, and not getting laid.
IRL asks, what happens to a modern, queer indigenous person a few generations after his ancestors were alienated from their language, their religion, and their history? Teebs feels compelled towards boys, burgers, booze, though he begins to suspect there is perhaps a more ancient goddess calling to him behind art, behind music, behind poetry.
Review
“[A] brilliant, funny, and musical book-length debut.” Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
Review
“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
Review
“On the narrowing frontier between song and speech, memory and oblivion, future and no future, Native and 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. And 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
About the Author
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).
Tommy Pico on PowellsBooks.Blog
The Line Hotel in Austin is new. It’s in previews. The restaurant is operated by my favorite winner of Top Chef. The entire city is drinking bottled water. I used bottled water to brush my teeth this morning. I have a craving for a Slurpee. I haven’t had a Slurpee in like seven hundred years. The streets are lousy with Bird scooters and Lime scooters...
Read More»