Tommy Pico's Feed Reviewed at New Yorker

Dan Chiasson reviews Tommy Pico's latest collection, which is "like a social-media feed, a scrolling, constantly refreshing 'now,' an adrenalized present that contains many versions of the past, including the past of the feed itself." Later: 

“Hindsight / is Good & Plenty I mean 20/20 / clearly / the worst American / candy,” Pico writes. His “hindsight” extends from dead memes to old flames, from the etymology of the word “fart” to his own origins “on a food / desert, a speck / of dust on the map of the United / States” where “the average age of death is 40.7 years old.” It’s the mortal hurry in “Feed” that makes its flippancy terrifying. Pico, “restless / searching for a nourishing territory,” is both death-defying and morbid. Sylvia Plath’s simplest line may be one of her most devastating: “I am only thirty.” I feel the same shudder when I read Pico’s blunt report: “I am 34.”

Pico, who lives in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, grew up on the Viejas Reservation of the Kumeyaay Nation, near San Diego. “Feed” completes his “Teebs Cycle” of four book-length poems (“How does everyone know the word ‘tetralogy’ but me”), which together form a rich anthology of the surprising modes of interiority in our present moment. Pico’s model for thinking is a brand-new one, and impossible to separate from its contemporary context. A “feed” of information isn’t a leisurely stream of consciousness; it updates itself manically, as if with a refresh button.

“Feed” is a road book, brightly discombobulated, written on the wing, full of grabbed meals, lucky sex, and appealingly corny jokes (“Tonight I am pierogies / Ross Pierogies”). Teebs, a nickname, is also a persona: a “hoar on a book tour” (“hoar,” since he has outlived some of his friends and family back home, “whore” because he peddles his art from city to city). And yet the road can provide “a kind of stability / being so thoroughly Teebs I mean seen,” where “seen” means both exposed to harsh scrutiny and acknowledged as a soul. Like Beyoncé, who knows that “the grain of performance is her feed,” Teebs performs, while Pico’s deeper, more fragile self “hides or hurricanes away onstage.”

Read on at the New Yorker.