Nature Poem, Tommy Pico
Nature Poem, Tommy Pico
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Nature Poem

Author: Tommy Pico

Narrator: Tommy Pico

Unabridged: 1 hr 19 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 04/21/2020


Synopsis

A book-length poem about how an American Indian writer can't bring himself to write about nature, but is forced to reckon with colonial-white stereotypes, manifest destiny, and his own identity as an young, queer, urban-dwelling poet.

Nature Poem follows Teebs—a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet—who can't bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He'd slap a tree across the face. He'd rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he'd rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole.

While he's adamant—bratty, even—about his distaste for the word "natural," over the course of the book we see him confronting the assimilationist, historical, colonial-white ideas that collude NDN people with nature. The closer his people were identified with the "natural world," he figures, the easier it was to mow them down like the underbrush. But Teebs gradually learns how to interpret constellations through his own lens, along with human nature, sexuality, language, music, and Twitter. Even while he reckons with manifest destiny and genocide and centuries of disenfranchisement, he learns how to have faith in his own voice.

About Tommy Pico

Tommy Pico is the author of the books IRL, Nature Poem, and Junk. He's been the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Poetry Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Brooklyn Public Library. He cocurates the reading series Poets with Attitude, cohosts the podcast Food 4 Thot, and is a contributor editor at Literary Hub. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Los Angeles, California.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Emily

I love Tommy Pico because one minute he's like, Get in, loser--we're touring landscapes of the interior. and then next he's all Hope is a charred skeleton of a house visible from a road that snakes through the valley of memory where fig trees burst from the ground like throaty laughter. --- Re-......more

Goodreads review by Uroš

Počinje kao (politički nekorektan) vic: Tomi Piko (i njegov lirski alter ego) je pesnik indijanskog porekla koji mrzi prirodu, uz to i gej. Ide mu na živce štošta, a posebno to što se američkim starosedeocima pripisuje dublja veza sa prirodom. On je urbano biće, usamljeno i promiskuitetno. Pliva na......more

Goodreads review by jay

welcome to 202-Queer 🌈✨ 50 in February: 15/50 never have poems about touching grass felt so terminally online......more