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Nature Poem
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Readers' Favorite Poetry (2017)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.
A Best Book of the Year at BuzzFeed, Interview , and more. 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.
A Best Book of the Year at BuzzFeed, Interview , and more. 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.
78 pages, Paperback
First published May 9, 2017
About the author
Tommy Pico
8 books325 followersTommy “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
Photo credit: Niqui Carter
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 412 reviews
August 31, 2023
I love Tommy Pico because one minute he's like,
and then next he's all
---
Re-read on audio (narrated by the author), and I highly recommend the experience!
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-read on audio (narrated by the author), and I highly recommend the experience!
June 3, 2020
Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem subverts heteropatriarchal constructions of sexuality and critiques, and actively resists, its influence on and power over the Native body. In an interview with Jeffrey Masters, Pico clarifies the distinction between the “assimilated” Native’s attitude toward gender and sexuality and the permissive, accepting attitudes held by tribes prior to colonization and erasure: “There was another way of life before this one,” a time when there was a ““recognition of other sexualities,” an absence of “binaries” that existed in most, if not all indigenous communities.” In fact, he notes, the world off the reservation was the classroom in which he learned to loathe himself.
In Nature poem, Pico, through his speaker, Teebs, makes several declarations, the first and most important being that those seeking an “authentic Indian Experience” need look elsewhere; this instance of Native poetry offers neither the cliched lament of “life on the rez” nor the expected reverence for or fetishization of the wilderness. Teebs pulls us through the city and between his various encounters with the” dudebro” and other emblems of ignorance. These interactions exemplify a dialectical relationship between the mission to resist and the need for sexual nourishment. At various points of the volume, Teebs appears to relinquish control in exchange for this “food,” only to reassert himself in a shocking (both for us and for his partner) way.
Another declaration is that Teebs will not perform the heterosexual, hyper-masculinized, Injun Joe'esque construction of the male Native; Pico imbues Nature Poem with an unvarnished sexuality, one that thrusts readers back into that “other way of life.”
All in all, Pico’s collection is a gritty and powerful exploration of marginalization and sexual subversion. Five stars.
In Nature poem, Pico, through his speaker, Teebs, makes several declarations, the first and most important being that those seeking an “authentic Indian Experience” need look elsewhere; this instance of Native poetry offers neither the cliched lament of “life on the rez” nor the expected reverence for or fetishization of the wilderness. Teebs pulls us through the city and between his various encounters with the” dudebro” and other emblems of ignorance. These interactions exemplify a dialectical relationship between the mission to resist and the need for sexual nourishment. At various points of the volume, Teebs appears to relinquish control in exchange for this “food,” only to reassert himself in a shocking (both for us and for his partner) way.
Another declaration is that Teebs will not perform the heterosexual, hyper-masculinized, Injun Joe'esque construction of the male Native; Pico imbues Nature Poem with an unvarnished sexuality, one that thrusts readers back into that “other way of life.”
All in all, Pico’s collection is a gritty and powerful exploration of marginalization and sexual subversion. Five stars.
April 26, 2017
(3.5) Tommy “Teebs” Pico is a Native American from the Kumeyaay nation and grew up on the Viejas Indian reservation. This funny, sexy, politically aware multi-part poem was written as a collective rebuttal to the kind of line he often gets in gay bars, something along the lines of ‘oh, you’re an Indian poet, so you must write about nature?’ Au contraire: Pico’s comfort zone is the urban, the pop cultural, and the technologically up-to-date – his poems are full of textspeak (“yr,” “bc” for because, “rn” for right now, “NDN” for Indian), an affectation that would ordinarily bother me but that I tolerated here because of Pico’s irrepressible sass: “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.”
Releases May 9th.
Some more favorite lines:
Releases May 9th.
Some more favorite lines:
“Knowing the moon is inescapable tonight / and the tuft of yr chest against my shoulder blades— / This is a kind of nature I would write a poem about.”
“I can’t write a nature poem bc English is some Stockholm shit, makes me complicit in my tribe’s erasure”
“It’s hard to unhook the heavy marble Nature from the chain around yr neck / when history is stolen like water. // Reclamation suggests social / capital”
February 9, 2023
welcome to 202-Queer 🌈✨
50 in February: 15/50
never have poems about touching grass felt so terminally online
50 in February: 15/50
never have poems about touching grass felt so terminally online
August 28, 2021
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 površini i plaši se smrti. Skoro svako svoje razmišljanje izvrće na naličje, ne iz opreznosti i ljubavi prema mudrosti, već zbog hipsterskog komfora. Primećuje da je sredinom 19. veka u Kaliforniji glava Indijanca koštala 5$, a da danas američki starosedeoci imaju najveći procenat samoubistva (na jednom mestu sam pročitao da je to drugi razlog smrtnosti mladih od 10 do 24 godine). Primećuje i kako je preživljavanje čudo, ali i da je Tejlor Svift idiot. Nada se da život nije samo splet mesa i nerava – žirafa koja se daje lavovima kao hrana u zoo-vrtu. Primećuje kako je nauka rasistička (47) i da su gej ljudi najgori ljudi na svetu – ništa im ne značiš osim ako neće da spavaju s tobom, međutim, dodaje on – vole pse (18).
Mnogo toga ima u ovom slam-poetry slalomu, ali meni je posebno zanimljivo bilo razmišljati o kontekstu prirode kroz postkolonijalnu i kvir prizmu. Ukoliko je, kako Rejmond Vilijams tvrdi, odnos sela i grada fundamentalan za celokupno poimanje kulture (ali i istorije književnosti), nameće se pitanje kako je stepen urbaniteta/ruraliteta povezan sa seksualnošću? I šta je sve (ne)prirodno u samoj prirodi? Navodi se u knjizi kako bi „Nature Poem” mogao zapravo samo da napiše belac – neko ko je živeo u običnoj kući, a ne indijanskom rezervatu (25). Oni koji su van prirode, bolje razumeju šta ona može da bude, jer je priroda konstrukt, kao i seksualnost, kao i organizacija života u zajednici. Tomi Piko izokreće čak i Spinozin „deus sive natura” primećujući kako ga upravo priroda tera da sumnja u boga (23).
Egzistencijalistički hipsterski ekopostkolonijalni pesnički drag queen karaoke – to je „Nature Poem”.
Hvala Osoru Mizantropu na otkriću!
Mnogo toga ima u ovom slam-poetry slalomu, ali meni je posebno zanimljivo bilo razmišljati o kontekstu prirode kroz postkolonijalnu i kvir prizmu. Ukoliko je, kako Rejmond Vilijams tvrdi, odnos sela i grada fundamentalan za celokupno poimanje kulture (ali i istorije književnosti), nameće se pitanje kako je stepen urbaniteta/ruraliteta povezan sa seksualnošću? I šta je sve (ne)prirodno u samoj prirodi? Navodi se u knjizi kako bi „Nature Poem” mogao zapravo samo da napiše belac – neko ko je živeo u običnoj kući, a ne indijanskom rezervatu (25). Oni koji su van prirode, bolje razumeju šta ona može da bude, jer je priroda konstrukt, kao i seksualnost, kao i organizacija života u zajednici. Tomi Piko izokreće čak i Spinozin „deus sive natura” primećujući kako ga upravo priroda tera da sumnja u boga (23).
Egzistencijalistički hipsterski ekopostkolonijalni pesnički drag queen karaoke – to je „Nature Poem”.
Hvala Osoru Mizantropu na otkriću!
April 4, 2021
I've never really been that much into poetry. There are only a handful of poets that I've read with some interest over the years, but for the last year or so I have read a little more poetry than usual. I've even started to seek out poetry by writers I know nothing about. When I came across this title, Nature Poem, on Storytel I thought to myself, Oh that might be interesting, a book length modern nature poem. Only once I started to listen to the author, Tommy Pico, read it, I got that it wasn't that kind of nature poem.
Tommy Pico is a gay, Native American, who lives in a city, and he does not want to write a nature poem. That's part of what this book is about. The reason has to do with identity, stereotypes, and racism. I guess this book is autobiographical to some extend, or perhaps even completely, I don't know. It is at least about being a Native American in modern day America. It's about things like being asked where he is from by fellow Americans, presumably because they think America is, should be white.
It's definitely not the book, I thought it was going to be, but it is a good one just the same. Pico has a way of telling a story through poetry that really grabs the reader. At least this reader. The way he builds his pictures, the imagery, and his conflicting view towards nature makes this a very interesting read. This really is strong stuff. I think it is very interesting, and may give it another listen soon.
Tommy Pico is a gay, Native American, who lives in a city, and he does not want to write a nature poem. That's part of what this book is about. The reason has to do with identity, stereotypes, and racism. I guess this book is autobiographical to some extend, or perhaps even completely, I don't know. It is at least about being a Native American in modern day America. It's about things like being asked where he is from by fellow Americans, presumably because they think America is, should be white.
It's definitely not the book, I thought it was going to be, but it is a good one just the same. Pico has a way of telling a story through poetry that really grabs the reader. At least this reader. The way he builds his pictures, the imagery, and his conflicting view towards nature makes this a very interesting read. This really is strong stuff. I think it is very interesting, and may give it another listen soon.
October 19, 2019
2/5stars
i just really don't understand modern/contemporary poetry yall. read for my grad school class.
i just really don't understand modern/contemporary poetry yall. read for my grad school class.
June 11, 2017
An entertaining and thought-provoking rumination on a world running out of uses for nature. Pico brings together disparate entities to underscore the absurdity of the way we live now.
December 1, 2022
I started putting stickies in this library book immediately on page 2, and there is a sticky on the final page 71. This was impressive. Tommy "Teebs" Pico hides nothing as he expresses how NDNs are treated, and the expectations that they are one with 'nature' is now-a-days a new nature. I loved the street/text vernacular.
My only justice to this collection is to copy my stickies to my review. Why not save yourself sorting through these and just go get this book asap and read it. Although it is not lengthy, be prepared to need to put it down and/or re-read that last poem you just read to let it REALLY absorb into your mind.
Easy 5*
OK - maybe at least read the first selection from pages 2 and 3. (since I took time to OCR/convert text). This encapsulates the tone and substance of this collection quite well
Selections:
p2/3
I can't write a nature poem
be it's fodder for the noble savage
narrative. I wd slap a tree across the face,
I say to my audience.
Let's say I'm at a pizza parlor
Let's say I'm having a slice at the bar this man walks in to pick up his to-go order
Let's say his order isn't ready yet and he's chatty
Let's say I'm in Portland be ppl don't tawlk to me in NYC Let's say he's like, meatballs are for the baby, pizza's for the little man, Caesar salad's for the wife and the beer he points to the beer and then thumbs at himself, the beer's for me.
He has one of those cracked skin summer smiles
He keeps talking like I want to hear him Like he's so comfortable Like everybody owes him attention
I'm a weirdo NDN faggot
He puts his hands on the ribs of my chair asks do I want to go into the bathroom with him
Let's say it doesn't turn me on at all
Let's say I literally hate all men be literally men are animals
This is a kind of nature I would write a poem about.
I don't like boys, men, or guys.
Don't like how they kick it on couches,
laid back, calves cocked
the neck muscles thrust up.
Don't like their dumb biceps bouncing the thunderclap laugh
choosing trucks over pink!? The musk the swoony wake, the misc bulges, stupid weight training Spot me bro
I was like pfffft, I says yr kind of hard to miss?
What they say to anyone ever in history, or in the locker room when they think no one is listening in a tight towel. Or everyday when they expect attention, ppl wide-eyed ears like satellites the words (apparently) torch torchin to truth.
Don't like them tweeting, texting, urn peeling rubber wetsuits off in the parking lot
sweatpants no discernible underwear lookin like whatever
Or! When they slick back swab the deck pocket square shoulders
The wave, the fade, the bang bangs.
Men dancing is fine tho.
Or like maybe men in socks? I dunno
- - - - -
p9
WHAT'S YR NATIONALITY!?!? This guy shouts at me during drag queen karaoke at this gay bar two stops down the line.
In order to talk about a hurricane, you first have to talk about a preexisting disturbance over the ocean, so you have to talk about mean ocean temperature, so you have to talk about human industry and sun rays, so you have to talk about helium, so did you know helium was named for the sun god Helios and was defined by a gap in the solar spectrum so literally not itself but what surrounded it, so of course we have to talk about the solar system, the Milky Way, the networks of universe and the Big Bang.
How far back do you have to go to answer any question about race?
UM, AMERICAN? I say
or
KUMEYAAY. I say I'M FROM THE KUMEYAAY NATION,
which are both technically true, but I know that when he says NATIONALITY he's saying you look vaguely not like a total white boy plus I'm trying to get lucky, so I put on my face that's the opposite of a tall can tipped over and glugging out onto the floor
I'M FROM AN INDIAN RESERVATION NEAR SAN DIEGO I burst back, over the drag queen sort of singing the Michael Buble version of "Feelin Good."
- - - - -
p11
Dear Gays,
I wish yr attention span was as "athletic"
as yr bod
- - - - -
p14
'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?'
- - - - -
p18
Gay men are the worst people ever
bc if they don't want to fuck you,
you are nothing to them.
Yet they love dogs.
- - - - -
p20
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.
- - - - -
p23
I don't like thinking abt nature bc nature makes me suspect there is a god.
- - - - -
p24
Once on campus I see a York Peppermint Pattie wrapper on the ground,
pick it up, and throw it away. 'Yr such a good Indian' says some dick
walking to class. So,
I no longer pick up trash.
- - - - -
p25
My current envy list includes ppl who make decisions, in general.
Envy is a shit tit. I meet a boy and I miss him. Time, a paragon of
confidence, taps me on the shoulder and asks
if I get legit anxiety when someone calls from a number I don't know,
cos it's like - who still calls?
- - - - -
p26
Nothing can fall that wasn't built
except maybe my self-esteem bc I have a hunch that I was born with it
intact but then America came smaked
me across the face said 'like it'
n the sick thing is getting smacked across the face makes me so we rn
and that's prolly why poetry, bc in order to get inside
a poem has to break you
the way the only thing more obvious than your body
is leaving yr shirt on in the pool.
- - - - -
p27
The perigee moon is above both of us, in Portland, in NYC, in San
Diego, in Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi, Guaynabo, Sri Lanka
Knowing the moon is inescapable tonight
and the tuft of yr chest against my shoulder blades -
This is a kind of nature I would write a poem about.
- - - - -
p28
Everyone is looking for their stupid soulmate rn
Sade likens dating to war, says she's "on the front lines"
which is also a kind of hunger. Really, I just see teeth
or a desert - u know yr thirsty
when you wonder 'does the bartender think I'm cute, or is he tryin to get a tip?'
but that's the wilds for you.
Everyone want to know where they can meet a good guy
then wants to go to a gay bar on Saturday night.
I'm cool with contradictions, but don't lie to yrself-
- - - - -
p29
I like the way my head shivers
resting on yr stomach when you say 'If I keep hanging out w/u I'm gonna get a six pack
from laughing.'
- - - - -
p49
I say ‘Facts are fallacies, created and curated by authority figures w/ agendas’ and I say, ‘Facts are used to subjugate, intimidate, enslave, and kill entire “races” of ppl reproductive rights etc’ I say, ‘so yeah I have a complicated relationship with facts and pretty much everything. The only thing objective abt facts is yr blind allegiance to them. James.’
or, I say nothing cos I’m tryin to get lucky.
- - - - -
P50
I can’t write a nature poem bc English is some Stockholm shit, makes me complicit in my trib’s erasure – why shd I give a fuck abt “poetry”? It’s a container
- - - - -
p57
Consequence shapes behavior. So does the absence of consequences.
- - - - -
p61
No one told me abt "Space Oddity" by David Bowie
Everyone must feel fresh and weird, and perhaps rightly so
in the sense that yr the only one who has been you —
a slap in the face of squiggly sperm and probability
How cd u not feel like a miracle
in the sense that everyone in yr line had to survive primordial waves of SoCal dehydration, waves of European disease, active predation by men whose bullets were bought by the US government the pendulum of genocidal legislation intended to rob yr tribe of it's sovereignty, the cultural bleach of NDN boarding schools that robbed yr grandmother's generation of the language, meth infestation of the 80s, and like George W. Bush
Ground Control really came around to Major Tom
and then loses him, like an orbit
Despite the flatness of the intro, I heard a ring of "traditional" motherly concern in the first two lines, take your protein pills and but yr helmet on vs the classical kind of detached father in the next line, Check ignition and may God's love be with you
An explosion of belief from the skeptical Ground Control
after the rocket launch, how can you account for a spontaneous
recognition of talent
really floods the drum we call ear
and given the parental tint I heard in the beginning
I keep mishearing the soft lyric tell my wife I love her very much
to tell my mom
I tell the rez, I think my spaceship knows which way to go
- - - - -
p65
Nature kisses me outside the movie theater
I can’t tell if it was a romantic comedy or a scary movie bc of politics
When Nature palms my neck I can’t tell if it’s a
romantic comedy or a scary movie bc the clarity of desire terrifies me like a stage
comfort only leads to predation, and anything marvelous
becomes holy in the Google translate of humanity
I prefer to keep it very doggy style
bc holy roars untouchable, tempers flare
and ppl die, violently, all over the world throughout time
- - - - -
p65
The difference btwn me at 15 and me now is being called a faggot was humiliating bc I thought faggotry was hot, sulfuric garbage
but now in the arclight of a self not unmade by shame, tho the
violence is scary w/this pale brawny NYU shithead callin us faggots,
the sentiment sounds more like ice
clinckin in a tumbler of vodka lemonade
- - - - -
p70
There’s no such thin as a perfect ending. You just have to stand up and say, “I’m ready to leave.”
- - - - -
p74
It’s hard to be anything
but a pessimist
when you feel the Earth rotting away on so many home pages and Taylor
Swift is an idiot and cigarettes
cost an arm and a let
I’m on a porch petting kitties and there is lavender in the air. The sun is over the hill and my friend Roy knows the names of all the plants in his front yard. One of the kitties is named Witch Baby and she likes to perch around your neck.
The air is clear, and all across Instagram – peeps are posting pics of the sunset.
My only justice to this collection is to copy my stickies to my review. Why not save yourself sorting through these and just go get this book asap and read it. Although it is not lengthy, be prepared to need to put it down and/or re-read that last poem you just read to let it REALLY absorb into your mind.
Easy 5*
OK - maybe at least read the first selection from pages 2 and 3. (since I took time to OCR/convert text). This encapsulates the tone and substance of this collection quite well
Selections:
p2/3
I can't write a nature poem
be it's fodder for the noble savage
narrative. I wd slap a tree across the face,
I say to my audience.
Let's say I'm at a pizza parlor
Let's say I'm having a slice at the bar this man walks in to pick up his to-go order
Let's say his order isn't ready yet and he's chatty
Let's say I'm in Portland be ppl don't tawlk to me in NYC Let's say he's like, meatballs are for the baby, pizza's for the little man, Caesar salad's for the wife and the beer he points to the beer and then thumbs at himself, the beer's for me.
He has one of those cracked skin summer smiles
He keeps talking like I want to hear him Like he's so comfortable Like everybody owes him attention
I'm a weirdo NDN faggot
He puts his hands on the ribs of my chair asks do I want to go into the bathroom with him
Let's say it doesn't turn me on at all
Let's say I literally hate all men be literally men are animals
This is a kind of nature I would write a poem about.
I don't like boys, men, or guys.
Don't like how they kick it on couches,
laid back, calves cocked
the neck muscles thrust up.
Don't like their dumb biceps bouncing the thunderclap laugh
choosing trucks over pink!? The musk the swoony wake, the misc bulges, stupid weight training Spot me bro
I was like pfffft, I says yr kind of hard to miss?
What they say to anyone ever in history, or in the locker room when they think no one is listening in a tight towel. Or everyday when they expect attention, ppl wide-eyed ears like satellites the words (apparently) torch torchin to truth.
Don't like them tweeting, texting, urn peeling rubber wetsuits off in the parking lot
sweatpants no discernible underwear lookin like whatever
Or! When they slick back swab the deck pocket square shoulders
The wave, the fade, the bang bangs.
Men dancing is fine tho.
Or like maybe men in socks? I dunno
- - - - -
p9
WHAT'S YR NATIONALITY!?!? This guy shouts at me during drag queen karaoke at this gay bar two stops down the line.
In order to talk about a hurricane, you first have to talk about a preexisting disturbance over the ocean, so you have to talk about mean ocean temperature, so you have to talk about human industry and sun rays, so you have to talk about helium, so did you know helium was named for the sun god Helios and was defined by a gap in the solar spectrum so literally not itself but what surrounded it, so of course we have to talk about the solar system, the Milky Way, the networks of universe and the Big Bang.
How far back do you have to go to answer any question about race?
UM, AMERICAN? I say
or
KUMEYAAY. I say I'M FROM THE KUMEYAAY NATION,
which are both technically true, but I know that when he says NATIONALITY he's saying you look vaguely not like a total white boy plus I'm trying to get lucky, so I put on my face that's the opposite of a tall can tipped over and glugging out onto the floor
I'M FROM AN INDIAN RESERVATION NEAR SAN DIEGO I burst back, over the drag queen sort of singing the Michael Buble version of "Feelin Good."
- - - - -
p11
Dear Gays,
I wish yr attention span was as "athletic"
as yr bod
- - - - -
p14
'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?'
- - - - -
p18
Gay men are the worst people ever
bc if they don't want to fuck you,
you are nothing to them.
Yet they love dogs.
- - - - -
p20
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.
- - - - -
p23
I don't like thinking abt nature bc nature makes me suspect there is a god.
- - - - -
p24
Once on campus I see a York Peppermint Pattie wrapper on the ground,
pick it up, and throw it away. 'Yr such a good Indian' says some dick
walking to class. So,
I no longer pick up trash.
- - - - -
p25
My current envy list includes ppl who make decisions, in general.
Envy is a shit tit. I meet a boy and I miss him. Time, a paragon of
confidence, taps me on the shoulder and asks
if I get legit anxiety when someone calls from a number I don't know,
cos it's like - who still calls?
- - - - -
p26
Nothing can fall that wasn't built
except maybe my self-esteem bc I have a hunch that I was born with it
intact but then America came smaked
me across the face said 'like it'
n the sick thing is getting smacked across the face makes me so we rn
and that's prolly why poetry, bc in order to get inside
a poem has to break you
the way the only thing more obvious than your body
is leaving yr shirt on in the pool.
- - - - -
p27
The perigee moon is above both of us, in Portland, in NYC, in San
Diego, in Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi, Guaynabo, Sri Lanka
Knowing the moon is inescapable tonight
and the tuft of yr chest against my shoulder blades -
This is a kind of nature I would write a poem about.
- - - - -
p28
Everyone is looking for their stupid soulmate rn
Sade likens dating to war, says she's "on the front lines"
which is also a kind of hunger. Really, I just see teeth
or a desert - u know yr thirsty
when you wonder 'does the bartender think I'm cute, or is he tryin to get a tip?'
but that's the wilds for you.
Everyone want to know where they can meet a good guy
then wants to go to a gay bar on Saturday night.
I'm cool with contradictions, but don't lie to yrself-
- - - - -
p29
I like the way my head shivers
resting on yr stomach when you say 'If I keep hanging out w/u I'm gonna get a six pack
from laughing.'
- - - - -
p49
I say ‘Facts are fallacies, created and curated by authority figures w/ agendas’ and I say, ‘Facts are used to subjugate, intimidate, enslave, and kill entire “races” of ppl reproductive rights etc’ I say, ‘so yeah I have a complicated relationship with facts and pretty much everything. The only thing objective abt facts is yr blind allegiance to them. James.’
or, I say nothing cos I’m tryin to get lucky.
- - - - -
P50
I can’t write a nature poem bc English is some Stockholm shit, makes me complicit in my trib’s erasure – why shd I give a fuck abt “poetry”? It’s a container
- - - - -
p57
Consequence shapes behavior. So does the absence of consequences.
- - - - -
p61
No one told me abt "Space Oddity" by David Bowie
Everyone must feel fresh and weird, and perhaps rightly so
in the sense that yr the only one who has been you —
a slap in the face of squiggly sperm and probability
How cd u not feel like a miracle
in the sense that everyone in yr line had to survive primordial waves of SoCal dehydration, waves of European disease, active predation by men whose bullets were bought by the US government the pendulum of genocidal legislation intended to rob yr tribe of it's sovereignty, the cultural bleach of NDN boarding schools that robbed yr grandmother's generation of the language, meth infestation of the 80s, and like George W. Bush
Ground Control really came around to Major Tom
and then loses him, like an orbit
Despite the flatness of the intro, I heard a ring of "traditional" motherly concern in the first two lines, take your protein pills and but yr helmet on vs the classical kind of detached father in the next line, Check ignition and may God's love be with you
An explosion of belief from the skeptical Ground Control
after the rocket launch, how can you account for a spontaneous
recognition of talent
really floods the drum we call ear
and given the parental tint I heard in the beginning
I keep mishearing the soft lyric tell my wife I love her very much
to tell my mom
I tell the rez, I think my spaceship knows which way to go
- - - - -
p65
Nature kisses me outside the movie theater
I can’t tell if it was a romantic comedy or a scary movie bc of politics
When Nature palms my neck I can’t tell if it’s a
romantic comedy or a scary movie bc the clarity of desire terrifies me like a stage
comfort only leads to predation, and anything marvelous
becomes holy in the Google translate of humanity
I prefer to keep it very doggy style
bc holy roars untouchable, tempers flare
and ppl die, violently, all over the world throughout time
- - - - -
p65
The difference btwn me at 15 and me now is being called a faggot was humiliating bc I thought faggotry was hot, sulfuric garbage
but now in the arclight of a self not unmade by shame, tho the
violence is scary w/this pale brawny NYU shithead callin us faggots,
the sentiment sounds more like ice
clinckin in a tumbler of vodka lemonade
- - - - -
p70
There’s no such thin as a perfect ending. You just have to stand up and say, “I’m ready to leave.”
- - - - -
p74
It’s hard to be anything
but a pessimist
when you feel the Earth rotting away on so many home pages and Taylor
Swift is an idiot and cigarettes
cost an arm and a let
I’m on a porch petting kitties and there is lavender in the air. The sun is over the hill and my friend Roy knows the names of all the plants in his front yard. One of the kitties is named Witch Baby and she likes to perch around your neck.
The air is clear, and all across Instagram – peeps are posting pics of the sunset.
January 31, 2018
This is an honest and beautiful book of poems. A few quotes that really stuck with me:
"Thank god for colonialist plundering, right? At least some of these artifacts remain intact behind glass, says History"
"How do statues become more galvanizing than refugees?"
"It's hard to unhook the heavy marble Nature from the chain around yr neck when history is stolen like water"
"anything marvelous becomes holy in the Google translate of humanity"
"When a star dies, it becomes any number of things like a black hole, or a documentary"
Starts and ends very well - overall good collection
"Thank god for colonialist plundering, right? At least some of these artifacts remain intact behind glass, says History"
"How do statues become more galvanizing than refugees?"
"It's hard to unhook the heavy marble Nature from the chain around yr neck when history is stolen like water"
"anything marvelous becomes holy in the Google translate of humanity"
"When a star dies, it becomes any number of things like a black hole, or a documentary"
Starts and ends very well - overall good collection
May 18, 2018
Pico is a poet to watch for a variety of reasons: the juxtapositions of identity and irony, his honesty about native affairs, the de-romanticization and re-enchantment of the natural world, the way he allows youthful speech and slang to be infected with poetic turns which a pastiche that avoids it feeling like a gimmick or even a conceit. Many of noted that Pico can be between the casual and serious, and in that way, some of his laugh-out-loud lines also end up devasting:
“I can’t write a nature poem bc English is some Stockholm shit, makes me complicit in my tribe’s erasure”
Or
"When a star dies, it becomes any number of things like a black hole, or a documentary"
The way in which this poem really works is the commentary on how it doesn't and can't work, and that framing makes the struggle for the Teeb narrator to break it out of the reductive and boring into the honest makes the whole thing really moving. The use of Twitter and text speech further drives home that point.
Highly suggested.
“I can’t write a nature poem bc English is some Stockholm shit, makes me complicit in my tribe’s erasure”
Or
"When a star dies, it becomes any number of things like a black hole, or a documentary"
The way in which this poem really works is the commentary on how it doesn't and can't work, and that framing makes the struggle for the Teeb narrator to break it out of the reductive and boring into the honest makes the whole thing really moving. The use of Twitter and text speech further drives home that point.
Highly suggested.
October 3, 2020
'Poems were my scripture and the poets, my gods
but even gods I mean especially gods are subject to the artifice
of humanity.'
Review to follow.
but even gods I mean especially gods are subject to the artifice
of humanity.'
Review to follow.
November 3, 2021
Nature Poem is a brief poetry collection by a queer, indigenous author caught between his heritage and his life in the city. It's quirky, funny, thought-provoking, honest, unexpected, and thoroughly modern. I'm not a big poetry reader so I don't have too much in the way of in-depth analysis, but I really enjoyed this collection. He interrogates his complicated relationship to nature, the expectations people have of him, the feeling of not quite fitting, of trying to stay connected to his heritage while not wanting to be defined by it. It's a quick read and a good one, would definitely recommend.
March 9, 2022
I weirdly enjoyed the experimental style of this piece that talked about nature as a toxic but loving partner. Not revolutionary but I still enjoyed it.
May 26, 2019
I really liked Pico’s IRL for the anxiety, tone, and form that the poem took - it is truly a great poem, and something you should absolutely read. I found this poem less adventurous than his first, being more safely political. While the best bits are those relating to “why he can’t write a nature poem” and issues of identity, I found the poem weighed down at times by sound byte political statements. While I think his criticism of postcolonialism is 100% valid, he is never critical of the systems of technology that less obviously but more insidiously buttress these older forms of oppression. Pico’s language and themes are so strongly rooted in the internet and major brands like Instagram or Facebook, yet ignore the part that they play in institutionalized racism. Pico says that to talk about nature, you have to go far back, eventually reaching the networks of human industry, the chemistry of the sun and the Big Bang - “How far back do you have to go to answer any question about race?” While he mentions this scope, it’s something he never really pursues - he asks why he should care about pesticides but misses the racist implications of how global warming disproportionately affects third world countries and poor minorities, or how men suck but the apps that form and reinforce that behavior are excused of guilt. While the poem has excellent moments, it prioritizes surface experience over development, acts of violence over continuous and ongoing subjugation, and the immediate present over the future. What I’m saying shouldn’t be applied just to Pico’s writing as it’s a more general criticism of the intersection of pop culture and social justice - but I found it prevalent throughout the poem, particularly one that is so heavily invested in the online experience. Granted, this is Pico’s poem, and it’s not his responsibility or obligation to engage with these subjects - his focus is on his lived experience and working through it. If you’re reading this book, you probably already agree with his politics - with that in mind, expect a treat, because Tommy is a exciting writer. But because he makes this the focus of the poem and doesn’t engage with the same formal and thematic elements that made IRL so exceptional, I found this to be a weaker poem.
November 11, 2018
The hell was this?
I don't usually leave negative reviews but I really disliked this book. First off this barely qualified as poetry and secondly it was written almost completely in texting language using all kinds if abbreviations which annoyed me to no end. The writing also fell disjointed while the themes the poet tried to pick were appreciable he failed to do them justice in my views.
I don't usually leave negative reviews but I really disliked this book. First off this barely qualified as poetry and secondly it was written almost completely in texting language using all kinds if abbreviations which annoyed me to no end. The writing also fell disjointed while the themes the poet tried to pick were appreciable he failed to do them justice in my views.
November 2, 2017
This poem pulls not punches as it tackles identity, stereotypes, and prejudice. I kept sharing bits of it on Litsy because it is so powerful.
October 17, 2018
i keep rereading this book. it's my favorite book from the last year. not to be dramatic but
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
thx
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
thx
August 30, 2021
The Read Harder challenge asked that I read a book of nature poems but I am incapable of following directions so instead I read a book of poems about hating nature and refusing to write a nature poem. Nature Poem is something like "A Song of Myself" if it were written by a self-deprecating, indigenous, urban, hipster, lgbtq man, and it is both brilliant and funny. Pico wrestles with his own identity throughout this text, and manages to write some beautiful poetry despite his refusal to follow stereotype as an "NDN" and talk about nature. Rarely do I like pop culture references in my literature, but somehow they work perfectly here. The flow just works, and if you aren't careful you may finish this thing in one night.
Highly highly recommended.
Highly highly recommended.
August 9, 2024
Sealy Challenge Day 9: Nature Poem by Tommy Pico
My first borrow from the Queer Liberation Library
A blistering and beautiful epic narrative poem about being a Queer Native American and having a complicated relationship to nature poems, and so much more.
I have no words to convey how much I loved this.
There is a partial reading and discussion here: https://www.youtube.com/live/ZvbKChfV... (Starts at 18.22)
My first borrow from the Queer Liberation Library
A blistering and beautiful epic narrative poem about being a Queer Native American and having a complicated relationship to nature poems, and so much more.
I have no words to convey how much I loved this.
There is a partial reading and discussion here: https://www.youtube.com/live/ZvbKChfV... (Starts at 18.22)
Read
June 22, 2023Poetry is hard af to rate because I liked some of the poems, and there were moments where I breathed out in adoration, but there were also times when I was just... reading. I wish I could own this book and annotate it--thats how I always learned how to read poetry, so it's hard to change that I guess.
June 30, 2022
There is a feeling of awe in these poems by Tommy Pico. How to write a nature poem?, when nature is devasted, the lands of his ancestors turned into nothing, the brooks and rivers dried, men, women, children killed for some cents a head? What is left of everything but destruction and desolation and the aboriginal people who paved the American lands are brought into reserves, are trapped in a rubbish sordid poor life?
It is hard to think how Pico can still bring beauty out of it all. Yet, he does:
(...)
The first stars were born of a gravity, my
ancestors -
our sky is really the only thing same for me as it
was for them,
which is pretty stellar inheritance
I don't know how they made sense of that swell,
how they survived long enough to make me, and
am sort of at war with sentimentality, generally
but that absence of an answer, yet suggestion of
meaning
isn't ultimately that different from a poem
So I've started reading the stars
(...)
It is hard to think how Pico can still bring beauty out of it all. Yet, he does:
(...)
The first stars were born of a gravity, my
ancestors -
our sky is really the only thing same for me as it
was for them,
which is pretty stellar inheritance
I don't know how they made sense of that swell,
how they survived long enough to make me, and
am sort of at war with sentimentality, generally
but that absence of an answer, yet suggestion of
meaning
isn't ultimately that different from a poem
So I've started reading the stars
(...)
August 16, 2017
I can't write a nature poem
bc it's fodder for the noble savage
narrative. I wd slap a tree across the face,
I say to my audience.
4.5 stars - Tommy Pico is one of my new faves. From the inside book flap: "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... 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."
January 8, 2022
what?
May 13, 2020
Nature Poem is the “sequel” to the long-form poem IRL. This one is less narrative and a bit more thematic, focusing on indigeneity (I think that’s a word), nature, queerness, and the art of poetry itself. I found Nature Poem less satisfying than IRL, but still enjoyable and well-made.
3.5 out of 5
3.5 out of 5
August 25, 2024
Beautiful poem, perfect for reading or listening to in one sitting. I loved the audiobook, hearing it from the author’s voice is unmatched. Highly recommend.
November 3, 2024
Audiobook
December 13, 2022
read for climate action book club - a great poem
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