Feed

by Tommy Pico

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781947793576
Publisher:	Tin House Books
Publication date:	11/05/2019
Pages:	84
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Tommy "Teebs" Pico is 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

…exhilarating, permissive, intimate. Even more than his earlier books…Feed lets sympathetic readers pretend to live…inside Pico's charismatic, uneasy mind, where lust distracts him from environmental disaster, and environmental disaster distracts him from performance anxiety, and performance anxiety distracts him from financial precarity, and wordplay distracts him from everything, while it lasts…Breaking off, then bringing his terms back together, Pico has found new ways to treat his readers almost (but not quite) as lovers or ex-lovers, close to his skin and close to his fears.

The New York Times Book Review - Stephanie Burt

"Restless, intimate and exhilarating."

The New York Times

"Feed, Pico's latest collection. . . will stop you in your tracks."

The Oprah Magazine O

"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

"A brilliant contemplation of love seen through the lenses of food, pop culture, and raw emotion."

New York Journal of Books

"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."

Shelf Awareness

"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."

D.A. Powell

"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."

Tommy Orange

"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