Feed
Tommy Pico
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Feed
Tommy Pico
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Sentences, scenes, visions fall apart in shreds, and readers follow, immersing ourselves in the maelstrom of Pico’s mind, almost as we might immerse ourselves in earlier book-length masterpieces of broad-gauge anti-narrative poetry by Walt Whitman, or Allen Ginsberg, or Bernadette Mayer.
...while this poem maintains the tone and concludes ongoing themes, it’s the most mature of the poems. Like Teebs, Pico as a writer seems to have grown up. It comes through in the prose. The language has confidence and the loose structure is at once risky and brilliant. It’s nothing new for poets to go rogue when it comes to stanzas and meter—that’s the norm, if anything. But Pico is so intentional and precise; the lines break and enjamb in a way that feels urgent. You just can’t stop reading.
Feed’s themes will be familiar to any reader of Pico’s work: love, written self-expression, and the search for a self and community in the midst of a world hostile to queer and indigenous people.
Feed may be the weakest entry in what his publisher calls the 'Teebs tetralogy.' Though it’s flawed, and somewhat overly stuffed with motifs, Feed also signals an intriguing shift in Pico’s work. Specifically, to story, scenes, and explicit, intentional structure.
It’s the mortal hurry in Feed that makes its flippancy terrifying.
The fourth book in the Teebs tetralogy...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 kósmos, with many stops along the way.
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.