Reviews

• A book with many attributes only to be appreciated as a physical copy.

• The first thing you notice about “Olio” by Tyehimba Jess, which won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, is that it looks like no book of poetry you have ever seen. It’s oversized, 8 x 10 inches, with a plain black-and-off-white cover, and more than half an inch thick. It looks less like a poetry collection and more like a workbook. Open it, and you discover that its difference from traditional books of poetry is even more marked. It has poems, to be sure, and some drawings and photographs, which aren’t unknown in poetry collections. It also has an official cast of characters. It has interviews. Some of the poems are on pages that have to be manually folded out to be read. And for the pages containing poems designated “Jubilee,” you can read headers and footers of the names and dates of African-American churches. The dates are significant – the year the churches were burned or bombed or suffered other kinds of violence. You begin reading “Olio” and you enter another world entirely. It is poetry, it is journalism, it is history, it is fiction, it is a minstrel show, it is ragtime, it is the Blues. Jess has created, or, more precisely, recreated, a world of the first generation of post-slavery African-Americans. He has told their story in a dazzling feat of imagination that fuses music, poetry, and history. The cast of characters includes familiar names like Scott Joplin, Booker T. Washington, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. It also includes lesser known historical figures like the composer John William “Blind” Boone, opera singer Sissieretta Jones, sculptor Edmonia Lewis, and the Siamese twins Millie and Christine McKoy, who made enough money touring to eventually buy the plantation where they were born. Here is one of the “Blind” Boone poems, in which he (and Jess) tell the story of how he lost his sight. Blind Boone’s Blessings John William “Blind” Boone caught encephalitis at six months. The treatment was removal of the eyes. Bless the fever in that night in the sixth month of my life. Bless the fever, for it gave me sight; it swole my brain to fit God’s gift. It brought the hand that would lift each eye from my infant skull. Bless the sweat; my baby bawl. Bless the horse that hauled the surgeon through dusk’s dark, half drunk and swearing, into mine. Bless the flame—it sterilized the metal of the spoon. Bless the path between lid and bone, slipped and slid by that instrument of my deliverance from sight. Bless the handling of the knife. Bless that night that gave me night, wrapped it ‘round my bloody face, whispered how I could be grace notes, arpeggios, a piano roll of sound copying each note from everything around me. You see, I’m sure at first there was the hurt and the scalding pain. But then again bless an infant’s too short memory. All I know is what lies behind light. I’ve learned this is what’s right for this one right here. Yes, bless the fever, then listen close. Spare an ear to this piano and shut your eyes closed… Threaded throughout “Olio” are a series of letters and interviews by the fictitious Julius Monroe Trotter in the 1920s. Trotter, who served in World War I in the 369th Infantry Regiment in the U.S. Army, was grievously wounded, and wears a mask over his head to hide his facial disfigurement. He is trying to learn the story of Scott Joplin, and he interviews a wide array of people who knew the ragtime composer and pianist. Jess is the poetry and fiction editor of African American Review and an associate professor of English at College of Staten Island. He received his B.A. degree from the University of Chicago and his M.F.A. degree from New York University. He has published a previous collection of poems, “leadbelly: poems” (2005), and his been recognized with a wide array of prizes and recognitions. The title “Olio” suggests that this work is a hodgepodge. Jess himself includes that as one of the definitions of “olio” at the very beginning of the work. But it is also “the second part of the minstrel show which featured a variety of performance acts and later evolved in vaudeville.” That may have been the inspiration for Jess undertaking and completing this work, but “Olio” is no hodgepodge. It is carefully researched and constructed with intent and purpose. Jess is bending poetry out of its familiar groove, to tell and re-tell a story that few Americans know. And it is a story that needs to be told.

• Such a wonderful book with deep meanings and interpretation. Jess tries his best to introduce those unrecorded lives who would have become famous if they were not born as slaves.

• Tyehimba Jess has created a masterpiece of historical literature through syncopation and musicality of language that blows the mind! The greatest musicians and vaudevillians: slaves in early 19th century-early 20th century: John William "Blind" Boone, Henry "Box" Brown, Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Fisk Jublilee Singers, Ernest Hogan, Sissieretta Jones, Scott Joplin, Millie and Christine McKoy, Booker T. Washington (quote: "He who dances language note for note on the industrial soapbox. He who, even still, feels a twist in his dome for his folk who still till fields of poems."), "Blind" Tom Wiggins, Bert Williams and George Walker, Wildfire, or Edmonia Lewis. Olio quote: "Fix your eyes on the flex of these first-generation-freed voices: They coalesce in counterpoint, name nemeses, summon tongue to wit-ness. Weave your own chosen way between these voices....OLIO." The treasure is on each and every tongue that Jess envelops with his fierce beauty that transcends and encompasses all: poetry, music, philosophy, history, dialect, conversation, lists: those lynched by the 100 thousands in the Southern states between 1882-1930 and the reasons given for the black lynchings. "I ain't bending over no piano like a plow on a sharecropper's piece." "–I'll just play the notes inside my skull alone in the dark where they roam around loose. 'Cause playing like a slave, I'd just step myself straight into a hangman's noose." On Sissieretta Jones, Jess writes: "See, Sissie would know how to let folks into one mask and out through another. She'd even raise a toast to the mask, jokin about whether folk–black and white–really believed that the opera was wearing her as a mask, or if it just tickled them to see her puttin on that white mask of Vivaldi. Was it her voice or someone else's? they'd seem to ask. Well, it was all her. Every note, in whiteface or blackface or in just plain old American, went straight down to her bones. That's what I heard when I truly listened, anyway. She'd pour those opera songs all over her body and then dress herself in the church frock of hymns. She told me one time, that in order to hear her true voice, she'd had to ask herself about her own masks. What kind of mask might I have on? she said. Because let me tell you, most don't even know they're wearing a mask. You've got to know which masks, how many masks you're wearing before you can put it down and see your true self. Those that do, they know just how to slide in and out of it, how to make the world spin inside it and out of it. How to spread their song all over that mask and make it one with the world, no matter how thick or thin the truth in that song might be." Heartwrenching brilliance and there is no outside these people. Jess brings every one to life! This is a book to be read aloud! Again and again and again! (and photos, fold-outs, illustrations: the structure of "Olio" is its own composition of a musical score: exquisite in every way! The ache and reach from the past wrenches the gut as all the masks of today continue to kill and maim under the guise of badges, self-defense, etc. and there's no missing the seething brutality of pulverized flesh in every fisted lie! If you only read one book this year, make it this one! "Olio" is a phenomenon! This is an epic. Thank you, Tyehimba Jess! Not enough stars for this one!

• Bought as gift and well received. Quality of paper not the best, which is my only criticism. The plus is it is probably printed on recycled paper,

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