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One of NPR's Most Anticipated Poetry Books of 2018
From 2018 Whiting Award winner Tommy Pico, Junk is a book-length break-up poem that explores the experience of loss and erasure, both personal and cultural.
The third book in Tommy Pico's Teebs trilogy, Junk is a breakup poem in couplets: ice floe and hot lava, a tribute to Janet Jackson and nacho cheese. In the static that follows the loss of a job or an apartment or a boyfriend, what can you grab onto for orientation? The narrator wonders what happens to the sense of self when the illusion of security has been stripped away. And for an indigenous person, how do these lost markers of identity echo larger cultural losses and erasures in a changing political landscape? In part taking its cue from A.R. Ammons's Garbage, Teebs names this liminal space "Junk," in the sense that a junk shop is full of old things waiting for their next use; different items that collectively become indistinct. But can there be a comfort outside the anxiety of utility? An appreciation of "being" for the sake of being? And will there be Chili Cheese Fritos?
"Starred Review. The poem is a therapeutic process for poet and reader alike; Pico demonstrates that a person's many selves, traumas, anxieties, hookups, and breakups can become a marker of courage and survival." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. An ambitious and impressive work, using visceral language, that will appeal to a wide range of readers." - Library Journal
"Junk is a true American odyssey...This is poetry of the highest order, on the level of a pop song, with the crystalline visions of a seer. I consumed it greedily, repeatedly, and am forever changed because of it." - Jenny Zhang, author of Sour Heart
"Pico is the master of making the stone stony, of returning the sheer absurdity of being to everything, from grief to intimacy to dating apps to donuts. Junk insists on the urgency of the quotidian, of, to borrow a phrase from Pico, 'vibrant inconsequence.' It's rare to read a book that makes living feel so alive." - Kaveh Akbar, author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf
"Tommy Pico's complex and lush third collection, Junk, explodes, rewinds, meditates, and explodes again. It binges and purges - on class, identity, sex, politics, snacks, comfort, and fear. ... Pico is a master of inclusion, of elevating the mundane to the sublime, of examining absurdity and grave seriousness with equal measure. This is an ambitious long poem, and Pico is uniquely qualified to both drag and celebrate modern day consumption and indulgence with graceful humor and grit." - Morgan Parker, author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce
"Pico hit the poetry scene hard with the first two volumes of his Teebs trilogy, which brings hyper-vernacular language to bear on issues of queer identity, the lives of indigenous Americans, and social conscience. ... [Junk] pops with more insight about the contemporary world than perhaps it knows." - NPR, Most Anticipated Poetry of 2018
This information about Junk was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Tommy "Teebs" Pico is the author of Nature Poem (Tin House, 2017), IRL (Birds LLC, 2016), and the zine series Hey, Teebs. 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, a 2013 Lambda Literary fellow in poetry, and a 2016 Tin House summer poetry scholar. 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, co-hosts the podcast Food 4 Thot, and is a contributing editor at Literary Hub.
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