The 15 Best Books to Take to the Beach This June

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."