Unknown Title

Title:

Olio / Tyehimba Jess.

Author:

Jess, Tyehimba author.

ISBN:

9781940696225

9781940696201

Personal Author:

Jess, Tyehimba author.

Uniform Title:

Poems. Selections

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

235 pages : illustrations ; 26 cm

Content Type:

text

Media Type (RDA):

unmediated

Carrier Type:

volume

Abstract:

"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, "--Amazon.com.

Subject Term:

African Americans -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Poetry.

World War, 1914-1918 -- Participation, African American -- Poetry.

African Americans in the performing arts -- 19th century -- Poetry.

African Americans in the performing arts -- 20th century -- Poetry.

African American entertainers -- 19th century -- Poetry.

African Americans -- Poetry.

Geographic Term:

United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Poetry.

Format:

Books

Available:*

Library	Item Barcode	Shelf Number	Status
Searching... Niagara Falls Public Library	34305005549772	811.6 JESS	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Niagara Falls Public Library	34305005549764	811.6 JESS	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

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 ' first book of poetry, leadbelly , was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, 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. Jess is an Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

Author Notes

Tyehimba Jess received a bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago and a master's degree in fine arts from New York University. He is a poet. His books include leadbelly and Olio, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2017.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Encyclopedic, ingenious, and abundant, this outsized second volume from Jess (Leadbelly) celebrates the works and lives of African-American musicians, artists, and orators who predated the Harlem Renaissance. Among its compendium of forms and characters is a series of sonnets tracking the uplifting performances of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the career of the once-enslaved autistic piano prodigy "Blind Tom" Wiggins. The orator Henry "Box" Brown, who famously escaped from the South in a crate, tells his own story by rewriting-taking back, as it were-some of John Berryman's "Dream Songs." Elegant paragraphs trace the career of the expatriate sculptor Edmonia "Wildfire" Lewis. Above all, however, the volume celebrates-and works to redeem, against old stereotypes-ragtime music and the ragtime composer Scott Joplin. Prose segments that carry the force of historical novels portray imaginary interviews, during the 1920s, with real people who knew Joplin: the interviewer, a disfigured WWI veteran, serves as a stand-in for Jess himself. Line drawings by Jessica Lynne Brown, exuberant typography, and the innovative layout reinforce the grand tribute that Jess's words project: "the nocturnes boiling beneath the roof of my mouth extinguish each burning cross," the singer Sissieretta Jones says, while Joplin himself explains what he meant to do: "lookin past the past and syncopatin into the future." (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Library Journal Review

African American history (indeed, American history) is inseparable from African American music, as evidenced by this remarkable new collection from National Poetry Series winner Jess (for leadbelly, also an LJ Best Book). In a lightning-strike act of blending historical research and imagination, Jess's poems range from the post-Civil War era to World War I to vivify mostly undocumented and underappreciated musicians, from the pianist Blind Tom to the Fisk Jubilee Singers to Scott Joplin. Jess effectively captures both collective and individual history: "Tell me, if we done burst loose from bondage,/ do our songs still carry hurt like a mule?" cry out the Jubilee Singers, who later say, "We boil the air with hallelujah's balm/ 'cause each of us got a story to yell." Inevitably, he visits the minstrel show (lists of so-called coon songs smack readers in the face), while elsewhere creating two- or three-column poems that can be read across, up and down, or at tangents. Though an appendix explains how the 10" X 16" foldout pages can be detached and rolled to effect different readings experiences, amazingly, these poems read like smoothest silk in two dimensions as well. VERDICT Highly recommended; this formally risky collection proves to be a character-rich, historically informed page-turner. [See Prepub Alert, 12/7/15.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.