Olio by Tyehimba Jess

With ambitious manipulations of poetic forms, Tyehimba Jess presents the sweat and story behind America’s blues, work songs, and church hymns. Part fact, part fiction, 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.