Nature Poem

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.

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.

not bad!

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.

Tommy Pico is an excellent and evocative poet. He manages to make his blunt statements and bold topics sound elegant without sugar-coating or lightening the weight of his words. Nature Poem is a truly beautiful work of art, and I've leant it to three of my friends who all loved it. On top of that, it's a quick read although it is not quick to leave the mind.

I read this book in one sitting, and then read it again the next morning. It's at once heartbreaking, irreverent, genuinely funny, and so gut-punchingly profound that basically every other page of my copy has a line I've underlined, or exclamation marks I've jotted in the margins. Buy it, read it!

Nature Poem is a poem chronicling the many kinds of nature around us. Some of the pages in Nature Poem broke my heart and some vocalized something within me I'd never been able to acknowledge. I'm deeply appreciate of Tommy.

Honestly, I haven't read all of it yet, but so far it is great. Product description was exactly right. I love this author's work. He's really different and he has wonderful insights. A joy to find something meaningful and fun at the same time.

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.