Book Review: IRL by Tommy Pico

Reviewed by Tim Lantz

IRL
Poems by Tommy Pico
Birds, LLC, September 2016
$18.00; 98 pp.
ISBN: 978-0991429868

In IRL, Tommy Pico does what the internet does best: smash cutting the public and private through riff and remix. His speaker, Teebs, runs on about always being connected, moving between the “me me / meme” of a typed-out life and the excitement of “having a thing / to hide in the age of knowin / everything all the time,” between taking on the online “too much of everything” and “deleting / all Internet wisps of yrself.” So much of life now is spent writing.

Writing is created for accounting
and still does, but is also a
bulging storage space Fuck
I’m a hoarder I give my books
away.

The move from physical to digital disguises the shift in the meaning of space—from how much of yourself to how much of your day is taken up with writing. Text saturates most of Teebs’s time: emailing his crush instead of meeting him in person, giving into the temptation to sub rosa scroll while out with other people in real life, “internet stalk[ing] the shit outta / this mf.”

Yet as much as interactions can now be PDF archived (and their minutiae obsessed over), textual overabundance betrays disappeared stories. Teebs is left with reminders of his remove from the Kumeyaay language and culture of his family.

Dictionary is kind of a blast
of chill air. Language is living
history class, like you n me,
conquest hardwired
into lingua franca—multi-
racial, neighborhoods, parts
of speech, laborious pidgin

Etymology is a prototypical save file, Pico shows us, hand-me-down shorthand for long-ago interactions we’ve forgotten. What words weren’t saved? In their absence, how can we address the tragedies, or even just the loneliness, to which they referred?

Questions such as these make this debut book from Pico brilliant. His writing is alive and sad and funny, usually all in the same line. Printed between stanzas are three circles, like those that pop up when someone is replying to your text, as though Pico were just now two-thumbing us these lines.

Tim Lantz’s current project is a multigenre, multilingual memoir about meeting his daughter in China. A new essay, on modernism and postmodernism, is forthcoming in the book Rethinking the Americas: Key Topics in Literature and Music, from Routledge. His website is timlantz.com.