Olio - Softcover

Jess, Tyehimba

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1940696208 ISBN 13: 9781940696201

Publisher: Wave Books, 2016

-WINNER OF 2017 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY-WINNER OF ANISFIELD-WOLF AWARD IN POETRY -WINNER OF SOCIETY OF MIDLAND AUTHORS AWARD IN POETRY-BLACK CAUCUS OF AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION OUTSTANDING  CONTRIBUTION TO PUBLISHING CITATION -2016 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for poetry
-2017 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award finalist
-2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award finalist
-Named a top poetry book of spring 2016 by Library Journal

Part fact, part fiction, Tyehimba Jess's much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.

So, while I lead this choir, I still find that
I'm being led...I'm a missionary
mending my faith in the midst of this flock...
I toil in their fields of praise. When folks see
these freedmen stand and sing, they hear their God
speak in tongues. These nine dark mouths sing shelter;
they echo a hymn's haven from slavery's weather.

Detroit native Tyehimba Jess is a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, and has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TEDxNashville Conference, and received a 2016 Lannan Literary Award.  Jess is an Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

About the Author:

Detroit native Tyehimba Jess’ first book of poetry, leadbelly, was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the Best Poetry Books of 2005.” Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004-2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team, and won a 2000 2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TEDxNashville Conference. Jess is an Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

Review:

It's something people who care for the music, or for African American cultural history, will read and reread, whether or not they notice its ambitious expansions of what has been possible for the contemporary poem. 
-- Stephen Burt, Academy of American Poets

"Olio" is one of the most inventive, intensive poetic undertakings of the past decade...
-- Michael Andor Brodeur, Boston Globe

• Publisher: Wave Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1940696208
• ISBN 13: 9781940696201
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256