A Way of Containing the Stasis: On Junk by Tommy Pico

Portland, OR and New York, NY: Tin House, 2018. 72 pages. $26.00.

Since 2016, Tommy Pico has published three book-length poems—IRL, Nature Poem, and now his newest, the stunning Junk. Notably, Pico is only in his early-to-mid-thirties. And to be specific, Pico has published three long, discursive, insouciant, thoughtful poems but no collections of short work, which is remarkable for a few reasons: his focus on book-length work, something most poets only dabble in; the fact that he has published three of these book-length poems in such a short time; and most importantly, that Pico’s books hum with vitality.

Junk—at times in Pico’s voice, at times in the voice of his “bratty diva” speaker Teebs—is a panopticon of a book, zooming in and out at will and covering a dizzying array of topics. Through the unifying theme of junk (more on that later), the poem addresses being Native American (Pico grew up on the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay Nation); being queer and being a poet; the exciting banality of living in Brooklyn; dating and sex and longing and aging; political violence and terror; and the sensory overload caused by thinking about all of this via an anarchic run-on style that is a simulacrum of sensory overload. Pico’s work is funny, incisive, insightful, and delightfully strange.

For example, Junk on “waterbed” bodies and edible butts:

like the morning and I’m like crud underneath a toenail My
stupid waterbed body Shame is such a shutdown sucking feta

from an olive’s soul Oh he def has an edible butt says someone
out of the void which means some butts are edible and some

butts are inedible Incredible Do I have an edible butt Edible
but Edible butt That’s pardon the expression bullshit Edible is

the birthright of all butts I hate gay guys so much There’s this
idea that only some bodies are worthy of desire and the others

To return to Pico’s publications, publishing three books—particularly three book-length poems, and book-length poems marked by a tumbling, informal style—in such a short amount of time raises the usual questions about quantity and quality, how could he produce so much, aren’t the books just stream of consciousness, et cetera ad nauseam.

Here, for comparison, are the opening lines of IRL, Nature Poem, and Junk. Comparing these excerpts shows Pico’s great sensitivity to rhythm and how he achieves it across his work. Since IRL, his lines may have lengthened and morphed into open couplets, but his breaks remain excellent.

IRL

I text Girard do
u wanna come
over? Watch me
stuff
swim trunks into
a weekender bag
and maybe a movie?
Regret is a gift
that keeps on giving I

 

Nature Poem

The stars are dying

like always, and far away, like what you see looking up is a death knell
from light, right? Light

years. But also close, like the sea stars on the Pacific coast. Their little
arms lesion and knot and pull away

 

Junk

Frenching with a mouthful of M&Ms dunno if I feel polluted
or into it—the lights go low across the multiplex Temple of

canoodling and Junk food A collision of corn dog bites and
chunky salsa to achieve a spiritual escape velocity Why am I in

this cup holder? B/c yr bubbly, dummy But I feel squeeze cheese
uneasy In Faggotland coupling is at best delicate precarious &

As noted above, Junk comments on sensory overload and the confusing, dizzying array of contradictory things one must keep track of (what Inger Christensen referred to as “head-spinning / horizontal knowledge”) via lines that flow into one another seamlessly. In fact, it’s often hard to tell where Junk’s lines begin and end. Remarkably, there are no periods used as end-stops in Junk; indeed, there are few end-stops at all. There are pauses, to be sure: em dashes appear pretty frequently, and the poem includes a handful of ellipses. But new thoughts and sentences are indicated by capitalized words inserted in the middle of lines (e.g., “struggles I’m learning to be less weary of abstraction It looks // periwinkle Sorry my mom’s a synesthete”). They’re like caesuras used as enjambments, except that neither term fits. Regardless, its style makes Junk, as evidenced by the excerpts in this review, difficult to quote and difficult to put down.

And Junk’s form mirrors its subject. Junk’s breathless open couplets, with new thoughts beginning in the middle of lines, are appropriate for a book whose title is a word that means “old or discarded objects of little value” (and which, per my copy of the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, comes from junke, jonke for nautical cable that could be “cut up and used”). But what exactly is the junk in Junk?

Junk is an elusive recurring motif, and across the poem it is used in almost every sense of the word. The first reference in Junk to junk is as junk food, and references to junk as genitalia (numerous and frequent), junk as something that “awaits its next life,” junk as thrift stores, junk as the accumulation of Capitalism, junk as memories, junk as old poetry, and junk as “waiting for a decision // like last call” follow.

In addition, the frequency of the word itself varies. Large sections of Junk are, well, junk-free, but then there are dense passages like the following, where Pico uses the word so often that it almost becomes an abstraction, more a sound stripped of meaning than a word:

had it Trash is thrashy Junk is gunk I sat on another pair of
glasses and cried for a legit 15 minutes but the lenses can be

recut and put into new frames I have a drawer of Junk glasses
missing an arm or a lens It could be worth something one day

I suppose Junk is also a way of not letting go—containing the
stasis We cd potentially be alive our whole life How to be Junk

and decisive I have this way of saying “bus” so that it rhymes
with “moose” when I want to be festive As in Gtg or I’m gonna

miss my boose I claw for reasons to live lol and find them Some
days you just have to take the boose to Crown Heights for a

tune-up Junk is anti-stasis Ashes to atoms In the sense that
Junk wants to become again How the fuck do ppl still have

In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag refers to cancer as a byproduct of the “toxic effluvia of the industrial economy that creates affluence,” and the same could be said of junk. As charming and frugal as shopping in a thrift store can be, one can’t escape the feeling that everything for sale was at some point another’s. And while most everything for sale in a thrift store isn’t toxic per se, others’ junk does carry an eerie aura of memory and predestination. Memento mori.

Unease—generally bodily unease (as it relates to desire)—is a frequent theme of Pico’s work, but in Junk the unease has sharper teeth. Junk is laced with fear and disgust, and with being overwhelmed by constant exposure to horrors (often perpetuated by white men): “First things first: get out of bed Another black man shot by // police Another missing woman in Indian country Another trans // person discovered by the roadside Another mass shooting They // pile like stones and overtake the poem.” Junk is a powerful view of America (which is “all action, no memory”) from inside America by a writer who doesn’t identify as American, and America doesn’t acquit itself well. Does America create the junk, or is America itself junk?

In a particularly effective passage toward the poem’s end, after he says goodbye to his Teebs alter ego—“But the more // I AM Teebs the less I’m writing because writing requires the // hesitation, the fear, the insecurity, the reflection so Teebs I’m // going to leave you in the lines”—Pico deftly weaves together Junk’s various themes with commentary on the 2016 Pulse shooting:

Almost two cranberry months since I said what you expected
Lychee martini Popping a boner in the ocean Suncreen smell

on the morning sheets I wd be lying if I said I missed u Or that
I made the wrong choice I’m not sure I ever gloved you It was

wrong of me to say it To build a monolith of expectation They
called the club in Orlando “Pulse” bc the walls, painted white,

would pulse with whatever color the lights were that night
Imagine the splattered white walls In the silence that followed,

the only noise was cellphones Desperate family and friends
wailing praying against their bottomless suspicions It’s all I cd

think about that day You were a sanctuary for my grief The
words felt easy bobbing down the river of my voice A human

This passage contains multitudes: both the loss of a relationship and finding sanctuary in one; the evocation of “Sunscreen smell / on the morning sheets” contrasted with love as a “monolith of expectation”; and Pico’s wrenching description of what Pulse must have looked like in the aftermath of the shooting. I have read few phrases that describe the fear of grief and loss better than “praying against their bottomless suspicions.” And this passage comprises a mere twelve lines, while the whole of Junk is filled with passages like this. It’s an incredible book.