Welcome to Litsy!

Tommy Pico‘s book-length poem embraces multiple identities—Indigenous, urban, queer—with a voice that‘s urgent, angry, sorrowful and intimate. Gay club culture, online dating apps and colonialism are just some of the topics addressed with wit and quicksilver mood changes. A quick read—75 pages—and so very approachable. #LGBTQ
@Reggie : thanks for recommending this fantastic book!
(Reposted under Review instead of Quote)

Tommy Pico‘s book-length poem embraces multiple identities—Indigenous, urban, queer—with a voice that‘s urgent, angry, sorrowful and intimate. Gay club culture, online dating apps and colonialism are just some of the topics addressed with wit and quicksilver mood changes. A quick read—75 pages—and so very approachable. #LGBTQ
@Reggie : thanks for recommending this fantastic book!

“oh, but you don‘t look very Indian” is a thing ppl feel comfortable saying to me on dates.
What rhymes with, “fuck off and die”?

Mirrors love attention.
Like everyone.

Who even wants to go into space?
I fucking hate traveling

I don‘t like thinking abt nature bc nature makes me suspect there is a god.
[…]
God wants everything, n I‘m like “God—you, I‘m sorry, but you are too much of a time commitment. I have a work thing. It‘s not you, it‘s me.”

🌟🌟🌟🌟

2020 Read Harder Challenge, book 16
Prompt: Read a book in any genre by a Native, First Nations, or Indigenous author
Title: Nature Poem
Author: Tommy Pico

I read another of Pico‘s books (IRL) for an earlier prompt, and I liked it so much I decided to pick up another of his works for this prompt. He is masterful at weaving together modern language with compelling, profound, and deeply cutting themes.

‪What an extraordinary book. I love how Tommy Pico moves between fire and tenderness and humor, sometimes all within just one line. Many of the books I‘ve loved lately have been about the struggle to be oneself, and this one does that in such a vital, energetic, scintillating way‬. Nobody else sounds like Tommy Pico. It‘s something I aspire to in my own writing.

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Tommy Pico is a gay, indigenous poet from the Kumeyaay nation outside of San Diego that now lives in Brooklyn. I‘m not big on poetry but I can‘t deny that some of these poems were successful if they got a reaction, right? I laughed. I felt uncomfortable with how true some of his words rang. I smiled at something I had felt but his poems gave words to. Pick!!!

Good morning from inside the polar vortex ❄️⛄️ today I‘m reading a poetry collection by queer indigenous writer Tommy Pico, and trying not to freeze my nips off from all this cold 😭 stay warm, Midwestern littens!!

It's a poetry and cats kind of night.

"Here is a short, peaceful, pastoral lyric: // Crappy water / Shoots thru purgatory creek / On its way to the Colorado River // *My bad*, says the EPA after accidentally dumping / 3 million gallons of waste in the stream. // *Fuck you too*, says Nature."

"I wd give a wedgie to a sacred mountain and / gladly piss on the grass of the park of poetic / form / while no one‘s lookin // I wd stroll into the china shop of grammar and / shout *LET‘S TRASH THIS DUMP* then gingerly slip / out"

"God wants everything, n I‘m like *God—you, I‘m sorry, but you are too much of a time commitment. I have a work thing. It‘s not you, it‘s me.* // God is wearing short shorts and demands worship, n I‘m like *God, yr balls are showing!!!*"

"Last night I had a dream that I was a ghost who gave blowjobs and that is pretty much the experience of dating in the city"

"Dragonflies experience a kind of quantum time, see a much richer spectrum of colors like a range of snowcapped mountains on molly and mushrooms and sherbet watercolors // and I‘m supposed to believe *we‘re* such miracles? // Ray Rice punches his girlfriend unconscious on camera and drags her out of the elevator, and I‘m supposed to give a fuck about pesticides? // That‘s not a kind of nature I would write a poem about."

Sweetness with teeth, funny, tender. ✨

NDN teens have the highest rate of suicide of any population group in America. A white man can massacre 9 black ppl in a church and be fed Burger King by the cops afterward. A presidential candidate gains a platform by saying Mexican immigrants are murderers and rapists

#AuspiciousBeginning

😍

Happy pub day to NATURE POEM by Tommy Pico!

"A thrilling punk rock epic that is a tour of all we know and can't admit to. Pico is a poet of canny instincts, his lyric is somehow so casual and so so serious at the same time. He is determined to blow your mind apart, and . . . you should let him.” —Alexander Chee