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Review ------ "Tommy Pico's epic poem is sad and funny and honest and wickedly clever with rhymes and rhythms. It is an utterly original aboriginal look at the world. I love it."―Sherman Alexie "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' trans to New York City from a California reservation. Teebs's lines channel a rush of Internet slang and emoticons, run-on ramblings and sentence fragments, and poppy lyrical bursts ('All of these Adams, / all of these Bens n them/ Benz and Rolls Royce's'). He has a laundry list of beaux with nicknames such as Big-Arms-Ugly-Face and Pompadour, but his true beloved is an artist named Muse, 'whose / even slight squint bursts/ me into high July.' 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 phobia 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 .―Publishers Weekly Starred Review "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."―Ariana Reines Read more ( javascript:void(0) ) About the Author ---------------- Tommy "Teebs" Pico was a Queer/Art/Mentors inaugural fellow, a 2013 Lambda Literary fellow in poetry, and has poems in BOMB, Guernica, and the Offing. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Brooklyn and with Morgan Parker co-curates the reading series Poets With Attitude (PWA). Read more ( javascript:void(0) )