From San Francisco, CA, United States
ARTIST STATEMENT:
Humor lays the groundwork for a hard truth and, for poet Tommy Pico, that hard truth is about living as an indigenous person in occupied America. "Alien invasion overlord movies / r cute in a Monet way,” he writes. “I survive seven generations into a post-apocalyptic America / that started 1492. Maybe / you'll live too?" Pico’s poetry builds a contemporary Native American persona, one that occupies multiple spaces simultaneously. Pico’s first book, IRL, is both in the form of a single epic text and inspired by Kumeyaay “bird songs,” some of the last surviving remnants of the Kumeyaay tribe’s long-form poetry tradition.
Interview with Tommy Pico, whose poetry is heard throughout the piece
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