Junk

by Tommy Pico

An NPR Best Book of the Year

From 2018 Whiting Award winner Tommy Pico, Junk is a book-length break-up poem that explores the experience of loss and erasure, both personal and cultural. The third book in Tommy Pico’s Teebs trilogy, Junk is a breakup poem in ice floe and hot lava, a tribute to Janet Jackson and nacho cheese. In the static that follows the loss of a job or an apartment or a boyfriend, what can you grab onto for orientation? The narrator wonders what happens to the sense of self when the illusion of security has been stripped away. And for an indigenous person, how do these lost markers of identity echo larger cultural losses and erasures in a changing political landscape? In part taking its cue from A.R. Ammons’s Garbage, Teebs names this liminal space “Junk,” in the sense that a junk shop is full of old things waiting for their next use; different items that collectively become indistinct. But can there be a comfort outside the anxiety of utility? An appreciation of “being” for the sake of being? And will there be Chili Cheese Fritos?

Genres: Poetry, Queer, LGBT, Indigenous, Gay, Fiction, Native American

72 pages, Paperback

First published May 8, 2018

About the author

Tommy “Teebs” Pico is author of the books IRL (Birds, LLC, 2016), Nature Poem (Tin House Books, 2017), Junk (forthcoming 2018 from Tin House Books), the zine series Hey, Teebs and the chapbook app absentMINDR (VerbalVisual 2014). He was the founder and editor in chief of birdsong, an antiracist/queer-positive collective, small press, and zine that published art and writing from 2008-2013. He was a Queer/Art/Mentors inaugural fellow, 2013 Lambda Literary fellow in poetry, 2016 Ace Hotel New York “Dear Reader” resident, 2016 Tin House summer poetry scholar, was longlisted for Cosmonauts Avenue’s inaugural poetry prize (judged by Claudia Rankine), and has poems in BOMB, Poetry magazine, Tin House, and elsewhere. He’s read for New York’s iconic Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, the KGB reading series, and Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) amongst many others, and has been profiled in Fusion, Nylon, and the New Yorker. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Brooklyn where he co-curates the reading series Poets With Attitude (PWA) with Morgan Parker at the Ace Hotel, co-hosts the podcast Food 4 Thot, and is a contributing editor at Literary Hub.

Photo credit: Niqui Carter

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagine if Ginsberg's Howl were written by a queer Native American man with a wicked sense of humor. That's Junk, and it is everything. Tommy Pico presents a string of thoughts and anecdotes into one compelling long-form poem made of couplets. One minute I'm laughing at lines like “I’m writing a // sitcom about butts and counting called Number Two The tag- / line is ‘turn the other cheek’” and the next I’m left speechless with others like “I’m an expert at // peacing out We all have our survival strategies growing up on / the rez America’s first POW camps In a way I’m indebted to // dissociation.” Pico floats seamlessly back and forth between funny and profound in this junkyard poem full of pithy treasures.

As someone personally wrestling with how much physical and mental "junk" to lug through my life, I loved how often this topic popped up throughout the book, tying it all together. Pico dignifies junk, because “Junk has the best stories." I loved the lines: "To ascribe / victimhood to Junk is to miss the point completely There's a // calm outside the anxiety of utility." I also love the bits where he pokes fun at Marie Kondo:

Everyone is reading The Life-Changing
Magic of Tidying Up--basically an anti-junk manifesto but it

has a point You should be accountable to what you touch"


The poem is full of motifs about sexuality, indigenous heritage, and disassociation, but Pico also weaves in countless other timely cultural themes. There are jokes and jabs about politics, dating apps, and "content creators," alongside mentions of border issues, police brutality, and poverty.

In the end, Junk manages to be both incredibly personal and universal. All the best poems are.

Thanks to the publisher for providing me with an ARC via Edelweiss!

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5) Junk food, junk shops, junk mail; junk as in random stuff; junk as in genitals. These are the major elements of Pico’s run-on, stream-of-consciousness poem, the third in his Teebs trilogy after Nature Poem. The overarching theme is being a homosexual Native American in Brooklyn. You might think of Pico as a latter-day Ginsberg. The text-speak and sexual explicitness might ordinarily be off-putting for me, but there’s something about Pico’s voice that I really like. He vacillates between flippant and heartfelt in a way that seems to capture something about the modern condition. I need to go back to his first book, IRL, and I’ll keep following his career. (Out on May 8th.)

Sample lines:

“the lights go low across the / multiplex Temple of // canoodling and Junk food”

“I’ve always wondered // why ppl use religion to justify their / prejudices cos shouldn’t yr / religion be challenging you to undo them?”

“I’m a basic butterfingers when it comes to / affection, it keeps / slipping out of my paws”

“Haven’t figured out how to be NDN and not have / suspicion coursing thru me like cortisol”

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brutal and astonishingly alive. I don't like using these sorts of metaphors, usually –– I think they're cheesy –– but for Teebs's sake, I'll indulge. This poem (and it did indeed demand to be read as one marathon poem; I delayed dinner, showering, and class readings to finish Junk in one go) is an antique store crossed with a buffet, leaving me continuously teetering between absolute pleasure and horrified overwhelm. Either way, I was breathless.

Even moreso, I was invigorated: some poetry books are like porn for poets. You read it to get yourself off, make your own poems. If that's the case, then reading Junk was like stumbling upon the hottest scene I'd ever watched: about 2/3 of the way through, despite wanting desperately to follow Teebs's story of (g)love and lust and hate and heartbreak to its conclusion, I couldn't help but rip out my quote-notebook, writing lines more quickly than I could think them, hand trembling with adrenaline.

Pico's wordplay is impeccable. The decision to mash together discrete "lines" into deceptively-ruly couplets is ingenious. Junk is a poem of perpetual excess, disorder that spills over the lip of its container, lingering in the minds and pens of its readers like stains in the wake of a feast.

[Anita · Rating 5 out of 5]

oftentimes i say things like 'im garbage' and/or 'im trash' and/or 'why am i stupid' and this book is that but he says it and he's proud of his abjection and this is the type of Junk-ie (HA) that i guess i can only aspire to be (Top Grade Trash!)

check

"I suppose Junk is also a way of not letting go—containing the stasis We cd potentially be alive our whole life How to be Junk and decisive
I have this way of saying “bus” so that it rhymes with “moose” when I want to be festive As in Gtg or I’m gonna miss my boose I claw for reasons to live lol and find them"

it

"“I feel you” I keep saying amid a burst of incoherent language, language bein the thing that we pour, molten n cool and use and chip and melt down n I dunno what to say when my date blabs reading is boring That he’d never finished a book b4 bc words don’t grab him/his attention I wanted to say “attention is a resource, the groundwater Condensation The band of elemental scar tissue protects us from solar wind Like a joint passed back and forth until it singes our lips—You gotta grab each other” But that’s some hero shit Maybe reading is boring?"

[Sandy Plants · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really love Tommy. It’s so refreshing to enjoy “poetry” again! I didn’t like this as much as Nature Poem or IRL but I still loved it. I know it’s annoying to compare artists to those before them, but I instantly loved tommy’s writing because it reads like a current day, gay beat poet but with less alcohol and drugs and more anal sex and texting.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Content is great as always but I really didn’t like the couplet-style structure of this as compared to his earlier works.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

!!!!! yes !!!!! WHAT a collection to go out on,.... a gorgeous & audaciously queer riff on Ammons' Garbage, thru yr burroughs & kristeva but there's no need to go about thinkin that way... I just really love this one. gorg

[Ariel [She Wants the Diction] · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't finish this book under the best of circumstances and, full disclosure, that might be affecting my rating. The power went out at my house last night, so I was kind of forced to finish this in the one hour of daylight that was left.

Previously, I complained about Nature Poem not being as strong as IRL. I felt like Pico just wasn't fully "on" in that book and while I liked it, there was something lacking and I felt some type of way about it. However, Pico is back in full force here! I truly, truly wish he would record audio for all of his books, as to me that's the best way to absorb them, but this time I was forced to reconcile with the poetic format. It can be frustrating, having to figure out where the line breaks begin and end - there's no punctuation, only couplets. You'll be forced to slow down, and you'll especially struggle if you don't recognize all the proper nouns he uses, as capitalization is one of the strongest clues. And a lot of the context clues you get from his inflection are totally lost here, because as I said, there's no audio to guide you. As a reader, you're forced to rely entirely on the text and I'm not sure I dig it?

I do find this book gets easier to read the longer you're immersed in it, and every time you stop, it's harder to get back into. Ideally, it's to be read in one sitting, but I find that hard to do just because the style and voice of the book are so manic. (If I'm allowed to say that? Hopefully that's not ableist language.) It can be sort of anxiety-inducing, kind of like the run-on sentence that is Ducks, Newburyport. Subjects change so often, fragments of thoughts fly past, and it's hard to focus on one thing for long. And I get that's a reflection of our modern times, and social media, and also just the chaos of a human brain, but nobody does this style better than Pico. I honestly feel like I could reread this book and still not totally "get it."

That said, I do like all the various meanings of Junk he played with (haha), and as always, his searing commentary on colonialism (very timely with everything that's happening in the news right now) and everything else. I guess I just didn't feel the "oomph" I expected upon finishing. And maybe that's down to the circumstances I finished it in, reading desperately fast so I could finish before the sun went down. It's hard not to give in to the temptation to read rapidly, because the thoughts/lines are rapid-fire, but I do think this is a book best read slowly and digested.

(In keeping with tradition, I'll probably add some of my favorite lines here later.)

[Bogi Takács]

This was awesome, he continues to be one of my favorite contemporary poets.

Source of the book: Lawrence Public Library

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pico's Teebs trilogy of book-length poems concludes with Junk, a paean to a break-up and to all that one loves that may not be entirely good for you. Pico's style here has changed: he uses longer lines than in his other two b00k-length poems made up of highly enjambed couplets. Pico maintains the stream-of-consciousness writing mixing textspeak, slang, and his general manic lyricism, but the change in the form actually does affect the reading. Junk's couplet's read like status updates instead of texts and blog ruminations that worked through his other two poems. He also concludes his panoply of pop cultural references, jokes, in-jokes, musing on identity, and ruminations of grief. Pico's gift from moving from the flippant to the utterly sincere shines here, and the theme of loss allows a slightly more mature sensibility to emerge from the prior two books. Many will feel like this invokes the Beats, particularly Ginsberg, and, for good and ill, it does, but ultimately, Pico's trilogy is a triumph that manages to be immediately contemporary and yet I can see myself reading in two decades.

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The battle of control is in learning to make, and giving it up"

I love that Tommy Pico's collections exist, if only because they're a great reminder of what poetry can be - punk-rock, meandering, anti-capitalist, pop culture love fests that aren't slaves to a more academic style. There's structure to this book-length poem entirely in couplets, but it's a structure that plays by its own rules, and while I think it's hard to pull this kind of poetry off successfully, JUNK is a rich, engaging, layered work that stands apart from the Beat poetry it will inevitably (and perhaps unjustifiably) be compared to. Worth coming back to more than once.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A breathless rush of sex, scattershot jokes, and topical anger. Pico weaves it all together like no one else writing right now. If you get a chance to see him read, check it out. He's one of the best I've seen--the emotional shifts, the voices, the unpredictable pacing, etc. More art than slam. More winking than spoonfeeding. He really delivers something fresh and entertains while doing so.

[Jackie · Rating 5 out of 5]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - me, reading this entire book, deeply fucked up about it! dark, very funny, very sweet, heart entirely ripped open. one of the most genuine works i’ve read about this time we’re living in.

[Erik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tommy Pico has uncanny ability to put the minds of his readers on the pages before their eyes, and "Junk," his third book of poems in as many years, is no exception.

Junk as the question about what it means that we collect all this junk, eat all this junk, date all this junk, love all this junk, and in asking this question Pico delves deeply into the inner trenches of human experiences - and particularly queer human experiences - in the 21 century.

With his usual depth of language that reverberates off an integrated use of slang, Pico makes you laugh out loud, cry out loud, and wish the book never ended.

[Jared Levine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Idk. Nature poem was better than this. And IRL was better than that. Seemed like a bunch of the same tricks but with less affect. To me. Rated it a three but only because Tommy is a favorite of mine.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well I absolutely adored Nature Poem (it was one of my favorite collections last year), but unfortunately this one did not live up to my expectations. It felt way more unfocused and the structure here (couplets) didn’t work for me.

[Lisa · Rating 1 out of 5]

A few good lines but it mostly felt like stream of consciousness ramblings that went all over the place.

[Adrian · Rating 4 out of 5]

a just-delirious-enough to be realistic ramble on how us homos handle life.

[Priscilla (Bookie Charm) · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Do significant swells write them-
selves When I started this I was delirious frenetic and in the

Cyclone I found Teebs, the bratty diva, my alter ego You rang?
I put him on and everyone loves him He is piss & vinegar &

Libido & punchlines"

Junk is the third book in Tommy Pico's collection of book-length poems. Junk is a long form poem about a break up told in couplets and is own voices for the queer, indigenous representation. I previously read IRL via audiobook and Pico's performance is so enriching but this was a very different experience because I read the physical text. It was a chaotic good time.

Pico weaves themes of pop culture, colonization, racism, and capitalism while also musing about dating. It reads like a stream-of-conscious fever dream and its incredibly immersive. Pico seamlessly quips about his partners, trauma, Janet Jackson, and all the different forms of junk. The only string that ties all these thoughts together is the formatting so this may not work for everyone. However, I felt like this poem held me hostage until I finished reading it.

This poem will hook you with its cheeky commentary on culture with lines like "Does America's shirt look eggshell-white or more like white panic?" but then have you reflecting on colonial violence with lines like "American 'Freedom' is a such a historical propaganda Indigenous and Black lives remind American exceptionalism that slavery, theft, and genocide are its founding institutions." Many of these lines are fragmented, fleeting thoughts and I think they speak to our growing habits of social media doom scrolling. Pico's poetry is a gift and I'll need to reread this multiple times.

I recommend this for those that enjoy dazzling puns and have the time to read this all in one sitting.

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Given that Pico writes from a gay Native American digital universe Janet Jackson fanatic standpoint, and that the only one of those I share even sort of is the love of Control and Rhythm Nation, it's slightly strange that I love Pico's poetry as much as I do. Junk completes what the jacket calls a trilogy and it probably makes sense to read IRL and Nature Poem first, but what's emerging is something like Allen Ginsberg's life-long song of himself in an aggravating and intermittently joyous world. I read Junk in two sittings--one marathon--and if you have the option and endurance, I'd recommend reading it in a single go since the circlings of mind and line hold the dozens of strands together in a funny vernacular jazzy tapestry.

Some of the lines that jumped (though I'm guessing the list will be very different every time):

I will stop writing abt the
conflict of my body when it goes away (29)

There is a common misconception abt NDN ppl, namely
everything but esp the sads (30)

I/ lived in another country I had to abandon More James Baldwin
than Ernest Hemingway (31)

Control is a reaction to something
smacking that cracks the future w/ no precedent (36)

Buttered popcorn flavored jelly beans
are literally the next extinction level event (56)

Life, I look forward to living you completely, with
all my shattered selves (57)

but I'm desc-

ended from a group whose culture hisgory language gods
cosmology calendear stories government gait was capital O

Obliterated I'll stop writing this when it stops happening (66)

Until further notice, I'm reading everything Pico writes ('cept for the blogs because he's digital and I'm not, smile.)

[Andy Oram · Rating 5 out of 5]

In unique, broad, bold language Pico throws addiction, his life as bisexual, and Kumeyaay Native American status--all concerning people he calls "garbage of the state"--into a book-length single piece of stream-of-consciousness. Washing down in this flood, with contemporary cultural references and abbreviations that mimic online postings, pop out short, coherent declarations, including political commentary and artistic statements--but also touching philosophy.

Junk can be mental blockage, sex organs (and acts that are described pretty graphically), junk food (described as graphically as the sex), drugs (occasionally), probably the whole detritus of consumer society, even junk mail. If Pico could charge food conglomerates for brand name product placement, he'd be rich. Food also intersects with Thanksgiving, a repeated theme in this book (which I happened to read just before Thanksgiving).

When evaluating literature and poetry, I give extra points to authors who take absurd risks and pull them off through enormous talent--and Pico wins my endorsement in this book. Don't miss out on the humor, too.

[Harper Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hands down one of the best books I've read this year. Poetry is so my jam. I'd heard about Tommy Pico on Twitter and decided to give his book Junk a go. Talk about a slice of New York. I looooved it! It made me smile. It made me laugh. Hell, there were even parts that made me tear up. This one is definitely going into the favorites pile.

[Siobhan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Omg wow wow wow just wow wow wow

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will write a review on Feed after reading the whole cycle.

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Need a bit more time to digest this one before writing a review... so so good

[Brandon · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

[Greg Bem · Rating 5 out of 5]

The third of the four part series is fantastic and it's the first I read in physical paperback form, an experience that is wholly unique and inspiring.

[Beck · Rating 5 out of 5]

This made me shake in wonderful ways.

[k-os]

Just so kinetic omg, I love him

[ciel · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was phenomenal, run to your preferred local book provider and get yourself a copy - u r in for for the real deal xxx