Feed
Tommy Pico
Reviewed by Madeline Vardell
Written as an epistolary to his reader, Tommy Pico’s fourth poem-length collection, Feed, weaves and lists his alter-ego Teebs’ life in flavor layers. Teebs puns and jests; asks existential questions; discloses fears of his own mortality; fantasizes about (tall) men—and most else.
In conversation with the world today, Feed’s verses interrupt with news headlines (urgently in all caps), or shift rapidly to dialogue with popular song tracks, or echo back. As a result, Pico delivers so much more than the connection of apostrophe. Feed tailors a recipe book, a playlist, a current events feed, an upkept journal, an index of curated wildlife. With nothing disparate about each of mode, we know when Teebs asks, “Is hunger something / I shd take care of with food,” he doesn’t only mean cuisine. When he says, “Being protective / of yr recipes is only natural. Things get stolen,” the theft extends and extends.
The collection’s lack of discrete poems, titles, and sections blurs and parallels Teebs consuming and converging anxieties. On one-page Teebs shares: “I grew up on a food / desert, a speck / of dust on the map of the United / States—an Indian reservation [. . .] where the average age of death is 40.7 years old. // I am 34” and on another, the realization: “HOLY / FUCK JAMES COMEY IS 6’8.” One might consider these high and low concerns, only Teebs never does. There is no hierarchy between his subjects. No ordering between grief and lust, Beyoncé and the ancestors, bank balances and the uncertainty of aliens. Like this, the collection offers humor and intimacy alongside what’s broken and wasting.
One of the final addresses of the book reads, “Dear reader, // yr easy to love but hard to get close to” and after this long conversation with who becomes a friend, readers feel close to Teebs. And so, gratefully, I close, Dear Poet, I did not know: “John Krasinksi, at 6’3, is the shortest of three / brothers” (thank you).