Food 4 Thot podcast host Tommy Pico talks about his queer poetry
Following the release of his award-winning 2017 poetry collection Nature Poem, author and hilarious podcast Food 4 Thot co-host Tommy Pico toured the country reading his work. His third collection, Junk, launches in May and is concerned with the impermanence of relationships, people and things; what happens to the hotel room after you leave it, what happens to the chair you throw away, who are we after our use changes. Before the LGBTQ POC artist joins his Food 4 Thot hosts at a live edition at Housing Works on January 22, he spoke with queer activist and organizer Micheal Foulk about growing up on a American Indian reservation, poetry, activism and his creative process.
How would you describe Junk? Junk is a breakup poem in couplets that is primarily concerned with utility and use and what happens when you’re in between. It asks what happens when a marker of your identity, like a pillar of your identity gets taken away. If you’re defined by your relationship or your job or your apartment or city that you live in…how do you reclaim your identity when one of those things disappears? What are you if not what surrounds you? When I was a kid on the [Viejas] reservation, my mom worked in a thrift shop, and I was so enamored with all of this junk in the shop, but was sad that not all of it would find a home. These things had lost their use, their identity. I found junk shops to be an experience of profound ambivalence.
Your books are very distinct from one other. How do you indi