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IRL

🌟 Winner of the inaugural Brooklyn Public Library Literary Award

🌟 Winner of the 2018 Whiting Award

🌟 Finalist for the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award

IRL is a sweaty, summertime poem composed like a long text message, rooted in the epic tradition of A.R. Ammons, ancient Kumeyaay Bird Songs, and Beyoncé’s visual albums. It follows Teebs, a reservation-born, queer NDN weirdo, trying to figure out his impulses/desires/history in the midst of Brooklyn rooftops, privacy in the age of the Internet, street harassment, suicide, boys boys boys, literature, colonialism, religion, leaving one's 20s, and a love/hate relationship with English. He’s plagued by an indecision, unsure of which obsessions, attractions, and impulses are essentially his, and which are the result of Christian conversion, hetero-patriarchal/colonialist white supremacy, homophobia, Bacardi, gummy candy, and not getting laid. 

IRL asks, what happens to a modern, queer indigenous person a few generations after his ancestors were alienated from their language, their religion, and their history? Teebs feels compelled towards “boys, burgers,booze,” though he begins to suspect there is perhaps a more ancient goddess calling to him behind art, behind music, behind poetry."

On the narrowing frontier between song & speech, memory & oblivion, future & no future, Native & American, IRL is Heraclitan, a river of text and sweat, whipping worlds into the silence of white pages: a new masterpiece.  And a new kind of masterpiece.  It's a lyric epic of desire whose hero renounces heroism.  & it's not he who voyages out in search of a world, but rather the devastated worlds in his own blood that seek him out, to mourn them.  I said epic of desire and I meant it: desire of every kind, for the infinite & the proximate, the fucking trite & the tried-and-true-- it's also a gorgeous monument, an act of memory for the future of all longing, for the fact of roots and the need for them, decolonizing poesis from the root without for one second the condescension of even the notion of safety.  For the poem is also deeply canny, and weary; it knows ""There is no post-colonial / America" and yet-- the poem keeps pushing out from under history, out beyond the poem's own billion negations, into a space both beyond identity and deep with it.

A gleeful combination of exuberance and threat.

Category:

Poetry

Binding:

Perfect Bound

Dimensions

6" x 9"

Publication Date:

September 2016

ISBN:

978-0-9914298-6-8

Pico’s brilliant, funny, and musical book-length debut finds his charming alter ego, Teebs, navigating the joys and difficulties of being a queer hipster “NDN” transplant to New York City from a California reservation. Teebs agonizes over Muse’s aloof behavior, quandaries about text messages, and the resigned admission that “Museless, I’m useless.” He is ambivalent about social media, denouncing the maudlin self-pitying Facebook posts of friends while praising his own cleverness: “I post a pic of Pangea/ on Insta for #tbt.” Though the poem exudes a summertime party atmosphere, Teebs calls out acts of homophobia as well as atrocities committed against NDNs, from their forced conversion by Spanish colonizers to the microaggressions of corporate cultural appropriation. He also invokes Gertrude Stein and Sherman Alexie as naturally as he does Beyoncé. Pico’s skillful rendering of Teebs’s coming-of-age attempts to create a cohesive identity out of his many selves proves to be entertaining, enlightening, and utterly relatable in the age of the smartphone.

Eileen Myles meets Rihanna, and Grindr meets Muse in Tommy Pico’s debut book-length poem, IRL. The poem speaks through the voice of Teebs, a character who shares Pico’s nickname and similarly resides in Brooklyn after growing up on the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay Nation. Teebs both yearns for and is haunted by Muse, an otherworldly abstraction and object of desire, as he navigates the simultaneously desirous and oppressive, simultaneously digital and material world. Teebs navigates his position as a single, queer, indigenous poet in America living within a world that demands an ordering of those words despite a simultaneous experience and singular body. The poem offers a politically sincere and sincerely political meditation on desire, oppression, language, history, and technology without one-note cynicism or kitsch.

Pico’s debut is America’s epic poem-text message that scrutinizes America, poetry, and digital culture. Tommy Pico’s IRL is an intimate and powerful commingling of the personal and the political and isn’t afraid to crack a joke; it is the intimately epic poem we need.

Pico, in his poetry, creates unsettling juxtapositions, which can have a comic or a dramatic effect—or, most often, some combination of the two. At one point in “IRL,” he writes, “Some things can go on / forever, like looping ‘You da One’ / by Rihanna or the colonial legacy /called ‘constant Debbie Downer.’” A more solemn example comes earlier in the poem, which centers on a character called Teebs. Teebs is an exaggerated version of the author, in the tradition of Fernando Pessoa’s Álvaro de Campos or Nicki Minaj’s Roman Zolanski.

This debut book IRL from Tommy Pico is brilliant. His writing is alive and sad and funny, usually all in the same line. In IRL, Tommy Pico does what the internet does best: smash cutting the public and private through riff and remix.

Tommy Pico released his first book, IRL, an epic poem in the form of an extended text message that was awarded the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize. Inspired by A. R. Ammons’s “Tape for the Turn of the Year” and Beyoncé’s self-titled album, the 98-page book was written over the course of three and a half months in 2014, and encompasses topics as broad as the oppression of Native Americans, pop culture and the dating rituals of gay men.

It’s Ok For a Poem to Be Funny: An Interview with Tommy Pico

Tommy Pico is part of the new wave of of poets spanning the worlds of print, online, performance and DIY. His debut book IRL is an exercise in storytelling that is at the same time lyric and conversational in tone, a reflection on the pains great and small of modern city life and a meditation on identity, place and personhood rooted in history but unfolding with force into today’s world. The scope of the work is not just in length but also location, stretching across the West and East coasts of America, the contemporaneity of the poet’s current Brooklyn home brushing against a childhood spent on the Viejas reservation in Southern California. Throughout, Pico’s voice rings clear and true, speaking to a frustrated generation, but a generation that still knows humor and hope. 

Tell us about the making of this poem.

The poem as a whole, which is over 70 pages long, started as an exercise at a Brooklyn Poets retreat in May 2014 actually. We read an excerpt from Tape for the Turn of the Year by A. R. Ammons, which was written on a single roll of adding tape over the course of about a month. I started mine as a sext that turns into the anxious, internal rambling that happens when you don’t get an immediate response, writing the poem as if one long text message. When I left the retreat it was three pages long, but kept working on it all summer and by August had a manuscript about crushing on Muse, cycles of compulsive destructive behaviors, street harassment, connecting to my lost indigenous language and spirituality through art, being a hot mess, and like karaoke lol.

There are not many other voices like his and for a young queer kid, native kid, weirdo- I believe that Tommy Pico has the ability to save people’s lives. In the first twenty pages of IRL I had already cried and laughed. The emotional range of Pico’s work is superb. His work makes me giggle then blows my mind. Seamlessly flowing from one thought to the next. While reading IRL, on the train in Brooklyn this summer, I feel human, I feel seen, I feel like I’m having a conversation with the book, or rather IRL is narrating what is going on around me IRL. How beautiful that Tommy Pico has created a work of art which so closely captures what it feels like to be alive TODAY. IRL is brilliant because it allows the reader to find poetry in their everyday life, too.

Tommy Pico’s IRL searches the catacombs of history and hashtags of today to create what can’t be salvaged. 

Tommy Pico’s debut book, IRL (Birds LLC, 2016), is an origin story rooted in epic tradition and a long-form poem that unfurls as a hyperconfessional scroll. Confronting legacies of colonial trauma, it inscribes an identity in “a post-apocalyptic America / that started 1492.” Pico’s speaker, Teebs, is an alter ego à la Sasha Fierce, navigating his experience as a queer Kumeyaay Indian alienated from his ancestral language, religion, and history. The personal is always political, but rarely is it treated with such deft humor. Sharp, successive pratfalls land us firmly in tragicomic moments, so that even as Teebs mourns a cultural inheritance marred by loss, there is play—or rather play is employed to access that mourning. Despite its precision and proliferation of wit, it would be a mistake to frame IRL as light. Throughout the book, he addresses these harmful rays emanating from the United States, which include capitalism, suicide, metabolic disease, team mascots, cultural erasure, and the dominion of English itself—the very language the poet must use for rebuttal.

What do you do when the Muse doesn’t text back? This is the question of Tommy Pico’s IRL, one of the most compulsively readable poetry debuts of the past year. An ultra-contemporary epic, IRL keeps it real in a few different ways: it represents life as it’s lived in the language of now, but it’s also honest about the challenges of doing so when you are, to put it bluntly, a survivor of genocide.Still, this does not stop Pico from singing, and singing to the gods; despite its topicality, IRL is deeply interested in spirituality, in seeking the sacred that history denied him. At once powerful and playful, old and new, IRL offers its readers something special: it expands our reality, and offers a way forward.

IRL exists primarily in what is in between: the journey required to meet a lover, the distance between parts of self, the physical connections that are rooted in the digital world (and vice versa). It is this back and forth between beginnings and ends, between action and consequence that gives IRL its life. If “There’s my body,/ and then there’s your body—/ basically the plot/ of every Beyoncé song,” can be thought of as IRL’s thesis (and the fragmentation of self that follows, its antithesis),  then “In Kumeyaay/ there’s a concept for in-/ between. Not knowing/ how to smile, how you look/ bent over a book” might be considered its synthesis.

The uneasy way in which Teebs inhabits these conflicting identities—the modern, tech-addicted, queer thirty-something and the indigenous descendant whose ancestry is under constant threat of occupation and erasure—provides an emotional center for IRL.

Meet Tommy Pico, the poet who penned a dizzying social media epic called 'IRL': Pico's IRL is an epic, nearly 100-page poem that follows Teebs, its queer Indigenous protagonist, on his never-ending search for Muse, an amorphous being that hops from boys to burgers to poetry to Beyoncé without warning.

Whipsawing between passages of erotic ecstasy and suicidal despair, IRL by Tommy “Teebs” Pico reveals itself as a monument of self-lacerating beauty.The poem intersperses Whitmanesque barbaric yawps between bleeding edge pop cultural references. It is of the now, yet it has the potential to become timeless. Is IRL the next “Howl”?

Tommy Pico’s IRL reads like a fragmented blog post educating its readers on the intricate interweaving of social media, race, sexuality, and mental illness.IRL demonstrates an ability to grasp and wield the proverbial sword of modern age depression humor, something which is very rarely found outside of social media platforms, let alone in a book of poetry. These themes interlock to form a truly inspiring, captivating and most of all, relatable story of young adulthood and the struggle to find your place within a society that seems hell bent on putting you down.

Tommy Pico's IRL Is Better Than the Internet: IRL is a high-velocity 98-page long poem with several places to stop along the way and catch your breath. The collective effect is a feeling of immediacy—you feel as if you're inside the head of a confidant, watching his brain spark around topics as seemingly divergent as blood quantum and salt 'n'vinegar chips.

‘I lift the house / of language, allow doubt / to whoosh in’: A Conversation with Tommy ‘Teebs’ Pico:

Pico’s poetry spills over any kind of containment, genre, characterization, his work is necessary, stunning (meaning, it stuns you, it stunned me), and precocious. The poem pulls and tugs at the border of American and Native, it negates itself, it’s a kind of masterpiece billowing out beyond the author’s place of location and yet folding in on itself.

	  			
I tell Muse
Leave. Me. Alone. Muse
.…
Muse is finally giving me
what I want. My hard won
sense of self surrenders thru
the sieve of yr attention every time.
What I mean is for fifteen
years I give all of myself to every
man I meet, mostly bc
I have nothing worth
holding. I want
to get lost, to merge and b
someone else. I look into
the water, a rolling exact
me I promise to find
or make something worth
holding onto. I’m giving
it to you. What I mean
is guard yourself. Erect
fences. Crop a mound
onto the bald land Sing
a Beyoncé song at
karaoke w/yr friends Envision
consequences n make
decisions Loose needles
of light from the dark
tent within Who is “everybody"
in the sentence “Everybody
Hates You”? Open
the book. Find
the song. I flush
at the prospect
of getting to know you
bc one of us will die
first n I develop
a taste for sparkling fizzy
rosé Great big bottles
of incapacitation. I run
hard until dark stars
blast away Tar Sands, Pine Ridge,
Ferguson, the Tea Party, stolen
Nigerian school girls, gay marriage,
Gaza, Kim Kardashian, Tim
Dlugos, fundamentalism, plane
shot from the sky over Ukraine
The bodies in summer sun
rot for days 6’5 white actor
slash personal trainer asks do I feel
connected to the land bc I’m
NDN—I haven’t learned to live
with everything yet
much less myself,
so I’m sorry for texting
@ 1:30 in the AM
I meant that for me
Come over, Teebs.
I can’t, w/anyone
until I find something
inside worth holding
and guarding and time.
Muse says Your ideation of me
is scary bc I’m a con-
struct of your imagination.
I’m afraid when you get
to know me, you won’t
like me—Not bc I’m
unlikable, but bc I’m
not you. Lol. Never tell
a secret to a river.
More excerpts from IRL:


from IRL in the Poetry Society of America

from IRL in Prelude Magazine

from IRL in Lambda Literary

from IRL in LitHub
from IRL in PEN America
from IRL in Gabby journal
from IRL [PANK]





from IRL in Powder Keg
from IRL in Blunderbuss magazine here and here and here














	  		

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