GAYLETTER

Take one glance at the digital cover for Tommy Pico’s newest poetry collection, Absent Mindr, and one thing becomes instantly clear: this is a chapbook unlike anything you’ve seen before. Touted as “the first poetry chapbook released as an app for iOS,” Absent Mindr encompasses 24 poems along with recorded audio of Pico reading them, all contained alongside artwork by Cat Glennon in a beautiful, easy-to-use app by VERBALVISUAL. Pico, who is a Lambda Literary fellow and GAYLETTER regular, has been working on the collection since September of last year, but it wasn’t until he approached the folks at VERBALVISUAL about a combination of art, writing, and audio that Absent Mindr came together. Once he knew the collection was going to be turned into a full-fledged app, the title, a play on Grindr and the absentmindedness that comes with compulsively checking one’s phone, came into clear focus. “To title it anything else,” he explains, “would have been a missed opportunity.”

The process behind creating Absent Mindr was anything but simple. As the first poetry collection made into app format, VERBALVISUAL had quite the task ahead of them in executing the collection’s fluid, four-part set-up. “No one had ever done anything quite like this before,” Pico explains of the behind-the-scenes process. “We had Skype meetings every few weeks to track the progress, both my edits and their design, but we ran into a lot of walls.” All of that trouble was definitely worth it, as Absent Mindr’s interface and implementation are both beyond smooth.

Containing themes of “love, family, pop divas, the body, and the voice itself,” Absent Mindr is innovative not only in form but also in content. Pico explores the intersection between cultural and sexual identity, drawing from his own experience migrating from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation to the hipster haven of Brooklyn. “I try to write the way I speak,” he explains, and it shows: many of the poems in Absent Mindr have an effortless cadence that practically begs for them be read aloud. Take “Simon Says,” with its playful riff on the childhood game twisted into the dark reality of an enabler, or “Das Butt,” a creative, tongue-in-cheek ode to that one guy in your life who just “really loves your ass,” no questions asked. There is no limit to the re-readability of Absent Mindr’s poems, each one offering a unique entryway into Pico’s completely enjoyable point of view.

You can download Absent Mindr for free on the iTunes App Store now. Check out the site for it here, and Tommy Pico’s author site here.