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Starred review from July 15, 2019
In the riveting fourth installment of Pico’s imaginative tetralogy, food, music, sex, and the void serve as means to reveal and dissect the speaker’s interior life. Stepping outside of his alter ego persona, Teebs, to wonder about the possibility of a “true self,” Pico resists the obvious narrative and claims that Teebs, perhaps, is more real than himself. The speaker declares himself a “recipe” made of the ingredients of his past and his family, defined by the intergenerational trauma of Native American genocide and displacement. His Native identity is both an albatross and an amulet of protection: “My spirits surround me like a cloud of disapproving aunties, keeping most of you at bay.” Amid the purposeful cacophony and confusion the poet throws at the reader, exacerbated by a lack of punctuation and erratic changes in line length, there are moments of stunning beauty: “What a better time than in the face/ of spring and the spring/ ephemerals—a bloom/ so/ short/ it puts the fleet in ‘fleeting feeling.’ ” Readers familiar with Pico’s work will find continuity from previous volumes; the poet’s present concerns and ongoing obsessions are proffered in a seemingly stream-of-consciousness format that is actually meticulously well-organized. New readers, as well, can easily dive in.

November 1, 2019
The fourth book in the Teebs tetralogy (Junk, 2018; Nature Poem, 2017; IRL, 2016) is one freewheeling, semi-stream-of-consciousness poem that follows its predecessors in its book-length format, spanning a wide array of subjects, from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego to the Greek k�smos, with many stops along the way. Pico includes a preface that situates the work along the High Line of New York City?the abandoned elevated railway converted into park space?with its cultivated gardens of wildness? a fitting description of the author's approach to poetry, with it's quick shifts in style and form, including snippets of dialogue, pronunciation guides, social commentary, and more. If anything coheres the collection, it's an incessant, remarkable wit, evident on nearly every page ("A hot person farts on the tarmac and gets super embarrassed and I'm like this is what it sounds like when doves cry"). Pico's lyrics may strike readers as unconventional in terms of the traditional Western canon, but they are forged in and speak urgently to a twenty-first-century audience. Another powerhouse collection from this incredibly prolific new voice in poetry.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)