Feed

by Tommy Pico

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781947793576
Publisher:	Tin House Books
Publication date:	11/05/2019
Pages:	84
Sales rank:	949,966
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Tommy "Teebs" Picois the author of the books IRL, Nature Poem, and Junk. He's been the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Poetry Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Brooklyn Public Library. He co-curates the reading series Poets with Attitude, co-hosts the podcast Food 4 Thot, and is a contributor editor at Literary Hub. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Editorial Reviews

★ 07/15/2019

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. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

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.

Fatimah Asghar

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.

DA Powell

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.

Danez Smith

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’sFeedsprawls 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.

Tommy Orange

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