Spend Time With Tommy Pico at NYRB

New York Review of Books hosts a conversation between Joseph Osmundson and Tommy Pico at NYR Daily. "Tommy Pico, a queer, Indigenous American poet, has published four book-length epic poems, the Teebs tetralogy, in the last four years," explains Osmundson in the introduction. "Pico grew up on the Kumeyaay reservation east of San Diego in the California desert, and writes about feeling as out of place there as he does among the young strivers and artists of New York City." More: 

In his first book, IRL (2016), Tommy is a writer without a voice. “I strain to sing,” he writes. Teebs is Pico’s alter ego, the Sasha Fierce persona he adopts to escape himself, to write, to date, to speak onstage. In IRL, Teebs is out for sex. He asks the important questions (“who do I have to blow to get / some sex over here?”) and makes admissions of vulnerability (“I feel small / online and in real life / bc there’s my body / and then there’s your body, and I don’t think anybody’s / coming over tonight”). The book ends with Teebs sleeping with a stranger just because he owns an air conditioner. New York summers, right?

Pico’s next two books, Nature Poem (2017) and Junk (2018), show us the conflict between Tommy and Teebs. As Tommy becomes more and more himself, he realizes that the shy, introverted identity might have been the one he adopted to survive. Maybe the loudmouth was his real self all along, and ‘Tommy’ the construction. Pico struggles to make art in opposition to the expectations that indigenous writers bring the white reader closer to a bygone, natural state. “I wd slap a tree across the face,” he writes, always ready with a punchline.

In his latest book, Feed (2019), Teebs is thirty-five and hunting for community, nourishment, and a body that will carry him for another thirty-some years to come. He is concerned, that is to say, with the state and transformation of his body.

Tommy is a Whiting Award winner, winner of the 2017 Brooklyn Library Literary Prize, a finalist for two Lambda Literary Awards, an NYFA awardee, and in 2017 he received the Friends of Literature prize from the Poetry Foundation. He has read his work all over the country, and he imagines his poems and his reading voice as inseparable. 

Read their complete conversation at NYR Daily.