Imagine Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" littered with Morgan Parker's pop cultural panache, and you'll get Junk, Tommy Pico's brazen third book, a long-form breakup poem at once hilarious and harrowing. The pages brim with mischievous couplets ("You can lead a man to Beyoncé, but you can't make him think"; "I'm not judgmental I just don't like anything you do"). Here, "junk" means everything from "broken radios n hopeful cassettes" and "the sticky soda of my boy meat" to "letting go of you." Pico, who is American Indian, blends personal and political fulmination: "'Freedom' is such historical propaganda Indigenous / and black lives remind American exceptionalism that slavery, / theft, and genocide are its founding institutions." This he follows with a directive to his lover: "Buy me a donut / and take me to a museum."
— Michelle Hart
