Feed

Sentences, scenes, visions fall apart in shreds, and readers follow, immersing ourselves in the maelstrom of Pico’s mind, almost as we might immerse ourselves in earlier book-length masterpieces of broad-gauge anti-narrative poetry by Walt Whitman, or Allen Ginsberg, or Bernadette Mayer ... What sets him apart? For one thing—as with all genuine poets—his style: Pico is always breaking off, beginning again, weaving rhymes into prose with few other patterns. This agitated irregularity lets Pico portray hungers both spiritual and physical, along with his attempts to remedy them by cruising, by writing, by cooking ... almost never feels depressive or despairing or stuck in place: Instead it’s exhilarating, permissive, intimate. Even more than his earlier books—because it’s more varied, jumpier, less consistent—Feed lets sympathetic readers pretend to live, for almost 80 pages, inside Pico’s charismatic, uneasy mind ... We are, at least, together for a moment with this poet in his eclectic and restless confidence, and maybe that togetherness will feed our hearts, though it will not heal our earth.

...while this poem maintains the tone and concludes ongoing themes, it’s the most mature of the poems. Like Teebs, Pico as a writer seems to have grown up. It comes through in the prose. The language has confidence and the loose structure is at once risky and brilliant. It’s nothing new for poets to go rogue when it comes to stanzas and meter—that’s the norm, if anything. But Pico is so intentional and precise; the lines break and enjamb in a way that feels urgent. You just can’t stop reading ... It should be stated that for all the heavy content and ideas found in this book, Pico is hilarious. Plays on words...make the work not only digestible, but relatable ... In his loneliness, Teebs is able to locate his inner-most, true self—he’s found his voice.

Feed’s themes will be familiar to any reader of Pico’s work: love, written self-expression, and the search for a self and community in the midst of a world hostile to queer and indigenous people ... Once again, we join Teebs’s group text, ready for his delightful, intimate ride. But something both subtle and substantial changes in Feed, in which the gambit of the previous book-length poems starts to stretch thin. It starts when Teebs breaks the proverbial fourth wall ... finding a dramatic energy in the address and its intimacy ... As the poem’s direct addresses accumulate, they illustrate personal barriers to forging the very community Teebs seeks. The poem starts to wonder if a persona like Teebs can act as an emotional crutch. That is perhaps what is most radical about Feed: how Pico questions the very existence of his alter ego, Teebs ... As the capstone in the Teebs tetralogy, Feed is both a meditation on community and a farewell ... By letting go of Teebs, Pico finds success in at least part of that project. He also makes room for an evolving voice that will tackle novel challenges ... What that other side looks like, the voice in Feed doesn’t necessarily know. But in discovering what needs to be left behind, Pico claims space for himself to grow — as a lover, a friend, a community member, and a writer. While Feed is a valediction to one poetic project, it also suggests that Pico’s next endeavor might even transcend his work’s existing vigor.