Olio

$25.00

by Tyehimba Jess

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

“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

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.

Paperback | 256 pages | Wave Books; First Edition | 2016

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