For Your Reading List

Feed by Tommy Pico

The poet Tommy Pico has published four poetry collections since 2016, each revolving around his alter-ego Teebs, a junk food-loving, anonymous sex-having, queer indigenous guy (he's Kumeyaay) who grew up on a reservation near San Diego. Feed is his last entry and it’s as hilarious, moving, and irreverent as Pico’s other works. Opining in the casual, abbreviation-filled lingua franca of the text or the DM, Teebs is on book tour now, possibly depressed, pontificating on pop culture, cracking jokes (“Avoid making stupid thyme puns like thyme after thyme, or thyme is / on my side”) while also grappling with the influx of sobering news stories; they literally interrupt his train of thought on the page: “The problem / was people / GUNMAN FIRES INTO OKLAHOMA CITY RESTAURANT.”

Food is a constant recurring theme — both his love for it: “the basics are my revelation. / The andouille sausage, the bacon/ tips, the ham hock, the scallions," and his complicated relationship with the cuisine of his people, irrevocably altered by colonization: “If the dish is, ‘subjugate an indigenous population,’ here’s an / ingredient of the roux: alienate us from our traditional ways of / gathering and cooking food.”

And he circles back over and over again to why he writes poetry. It saves him: “Poems light up corridors of the mind.” Get your copy now. —Tomi Obaro

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