Poet Tommy Pico spoke to Joseph Osmundson for the New York Review of Books about therapy, the New Native American Renaissance, and the language of food, among other things. Pico also discusses the concept of being a poem, referring to the line “Shall I be a poem for you?” from his latest book, Feed. “I’m definitely a poem for my parents,” he says. “You know that Langston Hughes quote about a dream deferred? That’s me to them. They wanted to be poets. But they didn’t come up in a time when that was possible for them. And they had responsibilities, and they had kids, which is not something you’re gonna catch me doing.”
Tommy Pico on Being a Poem
Flame Throwers
“Try to imagine Hemingway telling Fitzgerald, ‘My tailor flamed me on Amazon because I panned him on Yelp.'” Author D. Foy wrote a negative review of a tailor on Yelp, so the tailor threatened to pan his forthcoming book, Made to Break, on Amazon.
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Dog Whispering
“He says you should choose a book narrated by a person of the same gender as their primary master, played at average volume on an in-home listening device such as the Alexa-driven Echo device.” Cesar Milan is curating a list of titles for Amazon’s new Audible for Dogs initiative, reports USA Today. On the list so far: Pride and Prejudice, The Wind in the Willows, and Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (via Book Riot).
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The Eye of God
We’re guessing this is the first short story in the history of modern fiction to mention both The Legend of Zelda and a Reddit Ask Me Anything thread.
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The legends and the largely forgotten
The National Book Foundation has an online exhibit of the runners up for the award since its inception in 1950. That’s a lot of titles, so you might like to let John Williams be your guide.
Colum McCann’s Soccer Verse
Major League Soccer put together a nice video to accompany the audio of Colum McCann reading his poem, “Robbie Keane.”