Olio
by Tyehimba Jess
Summary
Olio constructs a sweeping, polyphonic portrait of Black performers working between the Civil War and the First World War, a period Tyehimba Jess treats as part fact and part invention, weaving sonnet, song, and narrative together to recover the lives of mostly unrecorded artists. The book brings in figures including the ragtime composer Scott Joplin, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the vaudeville performer Bert Williams, and the conjoined performing McKoy sisters, treating each as a subject worth the same formal seriousness a more famous historical figure would receive, refusing to let their historical obscurity determine how seriously the book takes their art.
Jess invents what he calls syncopated sonnets, poems built so that they can be read vertically, horizontally, or diagonally across the page, turning the printed sheet itself into something closer to a musical score than a conventional poem. That formal invention is not decoration: it lets the book enact the layered, call and response quality of the musical traditions, minstrelsy, ragtime, and the spiritual, that its subjects actually worked within, so the reading experience itself mimics the polyphony the book describes, asking a reader to physically turn the page rather than simply move down it in one direction.
Reading Olio means encountering one of the more technically demanding books ever to win the prize, poems that ask to be turned and reread in more than one direction before their full pattern becomes visible. It suits a reader interested in a genuinely inventive formal project built to recover a specific, deliberately overlooked slice of American musical and performance history.
Historical Context & Significance
Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; that year's finalists were Campbell McGrath's XX and Adrienne Rich's Collected Poems. The book also won the 2017 Anisfield Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, recognition that placed it among the most decorated poetry books of its year.
Jess was born Jesse S. Goodwin in Detroit in 1965, the son of a father who served as first vice president of the city's NAACP chapter and a mother who founded a nursing school at Wayne County Community College. He began writing poetry at sixteen, later completed a Public Policy degree at the University of Chicago and an MFA at New York University, and has taught poetry and fiction as an associate professor at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York.