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4.28 AVERAGE
4.28 AVERAGE
emotional
funny
reflective
fast-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Cursing
Moderate: Death, Genocide, Gun violence, Homophobia, Racism, Sexual content, Suicide, Murder, Colonisation
funny
lighthearted
reflective
sad
fast-paced
[T]he shutter of a poem is the only place where I can illusion myself some authority
read for class, listened to the audiobook while reading from the physical copy simultaneously. i do recommend listening to the audiobook over just reading the book as it's read by the author and said with sass and emphasis that the book lacks.
Poems were my scripture and the poets, my gods / but even gods I mean especially gods are subject to the artifice / of humanity.
there are some rlly nice lines here but the thing about having a lot of pop culture references is that it goes completely over my head most of the time and i also find it tacky other times.
Consequence shapes behavior. So does the absence of consequence. / America says some ppl are raised guilty. Some are innocent of everything. Some ppl will always have to be good at sports remain calm
really appreciated the talk about his relationship with nature and how it's (dis)connected to his NDN identity (and how other people react horridly to that) and colonialism. three stars for the lines honestly, but i wasn't particularly into the poems, nor was i invested in the 74 pages i read/listened to.
I can't write a nature poem bc English is some Stockholm shit, / makes me complicit in my tribe's erasure—why shd I give a fuck abt / poetry? It's a container / for words like whilst and hither and tamp. It conducts something of permanent and universal interest. Poems take something like an apple, / turn it into the skin, the seeds, and the core. They talk abt gravity, abt / Adam, and Snow White and the stem of knowledge.
funny
reflective
sad
fast-paced
Phenomenal audiobook reading of a strong poetry collection that ruminates on indigeneity and queerness with a sometimes-irreverent tone.
I've had issues all my life with poetry being too indiscernible or esoteric for me to get into, but Pico's Nature Poem was a breath of fresh air. A young urban queer writing about relationships and identity? Amazing. There were moments of brilliance throughout, although also some sections weren't as readable as I would have liked. Pico plays on the trope of Native Americans writing about nature, and how that conflicts (and conversely meshes with) his queer, urban life.
"I can't write a nature poem
bc it's fodder for the noble savage
narrative. I wd slap a tree across the face,
I say to my audience."
Thank you!
"I can't write a nature poem
bc it's fodder for the noble savage
narrative. I wd slap a tree across the face,
I say to my audience."
Thank you!
2/5
Because I liked the themes and a couple of the poems did work for me my rating was at 3 stars for a while but to be honest this is just a little too modern/contemporary for my tastes.
Because I liked the themes and a couple of the poems did work for me my rating was at 3 stars for a while but to be honest this is just a little too modern/contemporary for my tastes.
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
There is a feeling of awe in these poems by Tommy Pico. How to write a nature poem?, when nature is devasted, the lands of his ancestors turned into nothing, the brooks and rivers dried, men, women, children killed for some cents a head? What is left of everything but destruction and desolation and the aboriginal people who paved the American lands are brought into reserves, are trapped in a rubbish sordid poor life?
It is hard to think how Pico can still bring beauty out of it all. Yet, he does:
(...)
The first stars were born of a gravity, my
ancestors -
our sky is really the only thing same for me as it
was for them,
which is pretty stellar inheritance
I don't know how they made sense of that swell,
how they survived long enough to make me, and
am sort of at war with sentimentality, generally
but that absence of an answer, yet suggestion of
meaning
isn't ultimately that different from a poem
So I've started reading the stars
(...)
It is hard to think how Pico can still bring beauty out of it all. Yet, he does:
(...)
The first stars were born of a gravity, my
ancestors -
our sky is really the only thing same for me as it
was for them,
which is pretty stellar inheritance
I don't know how they made sense of that swell,
how they survived long enough to make me, and
am sort of at war with sentimentality, generally
but that absence of an answer, yet suggestion of
meaning
isn't ultimately that different from a poem
So I've started reading the stars
(...)
Pico rips through everything with a sharp and biting wit. This is a new generations 'Song of Myself'? No. But it is still fucking perfection. So much original thought and meaning.