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lraoutrha's review against another edition
5.0
This collection was one of the first books that was recommended to me at the start of my MFA program. Having finally gotten around to reading it, it’s easy for me to understand why. Olio offers a masterclass in form. Jess’s attention to structure at both the micro and macro level is truly astonishing. Every poem presents a perfect container for its themes and character. The arrangement of these poems, alongside drawings, photographs, “handbills,” and transcribed interviews, accumulates towards a chorus of voices, telling the stories of its cast with meticulous tenderness and power.
sara_shocks's review against another edition
5.0
One of the most meticulously crafted, genre-defying, and emotionally profound works I have ever read.
grayfeathers's review against another edition
5.0
I've never read anything like this before. Calling it a book doesn't feel like justice.
lizaroo71's review against another edition
5.0
When I finally got around to reading this one, I was surprised to find that none of my friends have read it nor have any of them shelved it.
Jess was the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for this collection of poems and I can totally understand the accolades. This is an amazing, mind-blowing piece of art. I mean I just can't say enough about what a master of words Jess is ... seriously.
The book focuses on the lives of various artists, writers, entertainers from the Antebellum South and beyond. Jess has chosen to play with form and uses something called syncopated sonnets to illustrate the narrative amongst his characters.
He also utilizes actual text pulled from interviews and songs from the time period. This makes what he does with the form even more amazing because he is forced to put words already on the page into his narrative.
There are some pages that are perforated and after reading the entire book, you can find pages in the back that show you how to fold and manipulate these pages to make the words create even more art.
Amazing. Amazing. Amazing.
Jess was the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for this collection of poems and I can totally understand the accolades. This is an amazing, mind-blowing piece of art. I mean I just can't say enough about what a master of words Jess is ... seriously.
The book focuses on the lives of various artists, writers, entertainers from the Antebellum South and beyond. Jess has chosen to play with form and uses something called syncopated sonnets to illustrate the narrative amongst his characters.
He also utilizes actual text pulled from interviews and songs from the time period. This makes what he does with the form even more amazing because he is forced to put words already on the page into his narrative.
There are some pages that are perforated and after reading the entire book, you can find pages in the back that show you how to fold and manipulate these pages to make the words create even more art.
Amazing. Amazing. Amazing.
balletbookworm's review against another edition
5.0
An absolutely riveting work of poetry that blends history, biography, and musicology with a little imagination to glue it all together. Jess brings the lost voices of black performers in minstrel shows of the late 19th/early 20th centuries back to life and also pays homage to the great ragtime composer Scott Joplin through the rediscovered interviews of Julius Monroe Trotter. This is also an interactive work of poetry (if you've bought your copy) - certain pages are meant to be torn out and taped together to create a cyclical conversation. A collection very worthy of a Pulitzer Prize.
swingdingaling's review against another edition
5.0
I think I could read this 10 times and still feel like I’ve not accessed hidden depths
steveatwaywords's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
Meta-Poetry, history, and thematic challenges to culture appropriation, artistic integrity, and the dehumanizing and perverse commodification of all things black--Jess's ambitious and sincere work nonetheless traces the very human stories of black artists from the 1850s to the 1930s, finding spaces for their voices in the local jubilees of houses of worship, in their oaths and song, in the intersections of their art and its utterance.
And still I have not captured the breadth of this large work, its pages (literally sometimes) unfolding to reveal not only the limitations of the poetic form, but the limitations of the paper itself. Read carefully to find disparate and antagonistic testimonies not only woven together but turning upon themselves. Jess's forms represent the performative contortions of black survival and rhetoric, the conditions of violence and the turning of that--at times--into a parody upon the parodies of minstrelsy or marketing.
Each of the poems is evocative enough, speaking the reality of its suffering, its spirit, its grounded understanding of circumstance. But the real power of this collection is in the juxtaposition and intersection of these words, the silences and spaces which turn upon themselves.
Yes, read it for the little-known tale of the tragic Scott Joplin or the dozens of others whose lives are (re)discovered in these pages, but also for the challenges offered to white and black creators and consumers, resolutions still too elusive.
And still I have not captured the breadth of this large work, its pages (literally sometimes) unfolding to reveal not only the limitations of the poetic form, but the limitations of the paper itself. Read carefully to find disparate and antagonistic testimonies not only woven together but turning upon themselves. Jess's forms represent the performative contortions of black survival and rhetoric, the conditions of violence and the turning of that--at times--into a parody upon the parodies of minstrelsy or marketing.
Each of the poems is evocative enough, speaking the reality of its suffering, its spirit, its grounded understanding of circumstance. But the real power of this collection is in the juxtaposition and intersection of these words, the silences and spaces which turn upon themselves.
Yes, read it for the little-known tale of the tragic Scott Joplin or the dozens of others whose lives are (re)discovered in these pages, but also for the challenges offered to white and black creators and consumers, resolutions still too elusive.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Cultural appropriation, Racial slurs, and Racism
Moderate: Toxic relationship, Slavery, Hate crime, Death, and Grief
Minor: Sexual content