num_pages: 72
description: An NPR Best Book of the YearFrom 2018 Whiting Award winner Tommy Pico Junk is a book-length break-up poem that explores the experience of loss and erasure both personal and cultural. The third book in Tommy Picos Teebs trilogy Junk is a breakup poem in ice floe and hot lava a tribute to Janet Jackson and nacho cheese. In the static that follows the loss of a job or an apartment or a boyfriend what can you grab onto for orientation? The narrator wonders what happens to the sense of self when the illusion of security has been stripped away. And for an indigenous person how do these lost markers of identity echo larger cultural losses and erasures in a changing political landscape? In part taking its cue from A.R. Ammonss Garbage Teebs names this liminal space Junk in the sense that a junk shop is full of old things waiting for their next use; different items that collectively become indistinct. But can there be a comfort outside the anxiety of utility? An appreciation of being for the sake of being? And will there be Chili Cheese Fritos?
language: English
title: Junk
publisher: Tin House Books