Nature Poem
This book-length poem follows Teebs, a young queer Indigenous poet who resists writing a nature poem. It pushes back against easy associations between Indigeneity and nature while leaping through urban life, desire, and colonial memory.
Work Information
Refusing to write nature exposes the prejudice made to seem natural.
One of Tommy Pico’s Teebs books, it mixes pop culture, humor, and anger to dismantle expectations around the nature poem.
Review Summaries
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Readers and reviewers value its agile voice and political sharpness. Humor and anger work together to make its resistance to stereotypes vivid.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Tin House Books
- Published
- 2017-05-09
- Pages
- 74 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 15.24 x 0.64 x 22.86 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781941040638
- ISBN-10
- 1941040632
- Price
- 3263 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/American
A book-length poem about how an American Indian writer can’t bring himself to write about nature, but is forced to reckon with colonial-white stereotypes, manifest destiny, and his own identity as an young, queer, urban-dwelling poet. A Best Book of the Year at BuzzFeed, Interview , and more. Nature Poem follows Teebs—a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet—who can’t bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He’d slap a tree across the face. He’d rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he’d rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole. While he’s adamant—bratty, even—about his distaste for the word “natural,” over the course of the book we see him confronting the assimilationist, historical, colonial-white ideas that collude NDN people with nature. The closer his people were identified with the “natural world,” he figures, the easier it was to mow them down like the underbrush. But Teebs gradually learns how to interpret constellations through his own lens, along with human nature, sexuality, language, music, and Twitter. Even while he reckons with manifest destiny and genocide and centuries of disenfranchisement, he learns how to have faith in his own voice.
Tommy "Teebs" Pico is the author of the books IRL , Nature Poem , and Junk . He's been the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Poetry Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Brooklyn Public Library. He co-curates the reading series Poets with Attitude, co-hosts the podcast Food 4 Thot, and is a contributor editor at Literary Hub. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Los Angeles, CA.
Reviews
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There is a beautiful uplifting spirit to this book that is at once disarming and then devastating. So much brutal fun. Such delicious melodies of human experience.
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Teebs is an artist who uses his razor sharp mind to scrape the inside of your soul raw, and repaint it with his ancestors' blood and tears, in colours your colonized language doesn't have words for. You will not find every phrase beautiful, but you will be beautified by reading it. If you are in one of his tribes (eg. queer, indigenous, 20-somethings in the 2010's trying to make meaningful connections in the streets or in the sheets) you will find many of your most painful thoughts laid bare. The rest of you are privileged witnesses.
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I teach university courses in Native American and Environmental Literature and just finished teaching Nature Poem for the first time in fall 2018. On the one hand, it's a challenging text to teach because there is SO much packed into every section of this extended rumination on Tommy Pico's ambivalent relationship with "nature": He wrestles with and rejects reductive white stereotypes of Indigenous peoples' complex connections with ancestral earth places, yet reflects lovingly on the beauty of his own Kumeyaay Nation homelands. On the other hand, my students loved this book so much that I didn't really need to "teach" it at all: Nature Poem speaks for itself, voicing Pico's smart, snarky, self-conscious, love-and-loathing relationship with identity boxes, in language that is fresh, lively, and ultra-contemporary (including text-talk abbreviations). Pico's wordplay, his colonialist critiques, and his willingness to go there make this book grow better with each reading. Buy it and treat yourself.
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not bad!
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Wow. Blown away by this. Love his use of language. I wrote elsewhere that I wanted to give out quotes from this, but every time I opened the book to find something I just started reading all over again. For me, the language was just the right mix of accessible and challenging. The subject matter too! It's a fine balance with poetry and there's a lot I don't have patience for, on both ends. But when it hits - woah. I have his first book on order and am looking forward to his next later this spring.