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Boyishly
Winner of the 2014 American Book Award in Poetry.
"Tanya Olson's Boyishly is a magic book. It casts a spell upon you. Olson uses language like Gertrude Stein does, building large monuments of sound into humming lattices, where a 'whale will do as a whale will do, ' or where 'tree forms shapes for tiger' and 'tiger takes shape / under tree.' In this book, Olson writes poems to a future America from beyond the planetary gravestone, where there is only a 'boyish summer' and the 'boyish waters.' The voice says come back to me. I am not done with you. I was waiting for you all along." —Dorothea Lasky
"Tanya Olson's Boyishly is a magic book. It casts a spell upon you. Olson uses language like Gertrude Stein does, building large monuments of sound into humming lattices, where a 'whale will do as a whale will do, ' or where 'tree forms shapes for tiger' and 'tiger takes shape / under tree.' In this book, Olson writes poems to a future America from beyond the planetary gravestone, where there is only a 'boyish summer' and the 'boyish waters.' The voice says come back to me. I am not done with you. I was waiting for you all along." —Dorothea Lasky
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
First published May 15, 2013
3 people are currently reading
63 people want to read
About the author
Tanya Olson
4 books6 followersTanya Olson lives in Silver Spring, Maryland and is a Lecturer in English at University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). Her first book, Boyishly, was published by YesYes Books in 2013 and was awarded a 2014 American Book Award. She has also won the Discovery/Boston Review prize and was named a Lambda Emerging Writers Fellow by the Lambda Literary Foundation. Her poem 54 Prince was included in Best American Poetry 2015.
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October 30, 2014This gorgeously bound little volume, issued by YesYes Books in 2013 and awarded an American Book Award earlier this year, marks the publishing debut of North Carolina poet Tanya Olson. Olson is one of a select number of poets active today who have successfully bridged the worlds of performance poetry and academic poetry. In fact, it was the experience of witnessing one of Olson's blood-pumping live readings of her work that impelled me to buy Boyishly.
To give you a flavor of Olson's performance style, here is a recording of Olson reading her poem "Flower of the Mountain," courtesy of Beloit Poetry Journal: http://www.bpj.org/poems/olson_flower...
And here is the printed text of that same poem: http://www.bpj.org/poems/olson_flower...
Perusing Boyishly, I was startled to feel thistle-pricks of recognition on almost every page -- shocked to find that these weird, pellucid poems were mirroring all my strangest obsessions back at me. All these lunatic fixations that I thought were peculiar to my own mind -- the 2009 Connecticut chimpanzee mauling, the Biblical story of Jonah and the whale, the only-recently-publicized friendship that secretly blossomed decades ago between Samuel Beckett and Andre the Giant -- these various oddities are all lovingly given a home in Olson's eccentric, eclectic verse. Here I was, naively believing until I cracked open this book yesterday that mine was the only brain to have ever brooded upon these subjects, mine the only hand to have ever written poems about them, and now I learn that Tanya Olson arrived on these shores before me, kissed them, peed on them, planted her zany patchwork flags all over them... I don't know whether to feel exhilaration or disappointment!
Olson's poems draw from an impressively deep well of knowledge about history and geography, a knowledge base that spans virtually all of America in its queer multicolored diversity, but focuses an especially intimate gaze on the war-ravaged American South that Olson has long called home. During a Q&A session that followed the poetry reading I mentioned above, Olson spoke at length about what she thinks it means to be an "American poet," what it entails. It was an inspirational, thought-provoking discourse about the risks and rewards involved in speaking not just from one's own singular vantage point as a heterosexual Vietnamese-American woman from Minnesota or whatever, but also having the courage, the veritable presumptuousness, to try walking around in other people's skins from time to time as well. One of the most conspicuous strengths of Olson's poetry is how each of her poems blends together myriad voices, belonging to myriad people, telling myriad stories, in myriad dialects. In this way, she ushers T.S. Eliot into the 21st century.
As a cetaceophile, my favorite poem in this book was "Notes From Jonah's Therapy Sessions," a simultaneously uproarious and tender poem wherein Olson vividly imagines Jonah's post-whale blues:
"...[T]here comes
a point. The whale completes his mission
and he spits you out. God's plan concludes
and he spits you out. The whale and God
go missing. The whale and God
no longer come around....
So you begin to tell the story of your time
inside the whale, first to friends, then for pay.
How each night you scan the audience
sure the whale will show, sure that God
will show. How you are looking
while you are talking...."
How original, how absurd, and yet how touching this image of Jonah's eyes searching the audience for the whale!
"Then, at the end of the night, the pressure
shifts again and they come to shake your hand...
After all the talking and after shaking
all the hands, the night ends and you are left
with little except that God and the whale
were not here again..."
The story of Jonah and the whale has never felt so modern. Presenting a vision of modernity enwrapped in history, diversity enwrapped in unity, Olson's Boyishly is a fresh, compelling book I would recommend to anyone.
To give you a flavor of Olson's performance style, here is a recording of Olson reading her poem "Flower of the Mountain," courtesy of Beloit Poetry Journal: http://www.bpj.org/poems/olson_flower...
And here is the printed text of that same poem: http://www.bpj.org/poems/olson_flower...
Perusing Boyishly, I was startled to feel thistle-pricks of recognition on almost every page -- shocked to find that these weird, pellucid poems were mirroring all my strangest obsessions back at me. All these lunatic fixations that I thought were peculiar to my own mind -- the 2009 Connecticut chimpanzee mauling, the Biblical story of Jonah and the whale, the only-recently-publicized friendship that secretly blossomed decades ago between Samuel Beckett and Andre the Giant -- these various oddities are all lovingly given a home in Olson's eccentric, eclectic verse. Here I was, naively believing until I cracked open this book yesterday that mine was the only brain to have ever brooded upon these subjects, mine the only hand to have ever written poems about them, and now I learn that Tanya Olson arrived on these shores before me, kissed them, peed on them, planted her zany patchwork flags all over them... I don't know whether to feel exhilaration or disappointment!
Olson's poems draw from an impressively deep well of knowledge about history and geography, a knowledge base that spans virtually all of America in its queer multicolored diversity, but focuses an especially intimate gaze on the war-ravaged American South that Olson has long called home. During a Q&A session that followed the poetry reading I mentioned above, Olson spoke at length about what she thinks it means to be an "American poet," what it entails. It was an inspirational, thought-provoking discourse about the risks and rewards involved in speaking not just from one's own singular vantage point as a heterosexual Vietnamese-American woman from Minnesota or whatever, but also having the courage, the veritable presumptuousness, to try walking around in other people's skins from time to time as well. One of the most conspicuous strengths of Olson's poetry is how each of her poems blends together myriad voices, belonging to myriad people, telling myriad stories, in myriad dialects. In this way, she ushers T.S. Eliot into the 21st century.
As a cetaceophile, my favorite poem in this book was "Notes From Jonah's Therapy Sessions," a simultaneously uproarious and tender poem wherein Olson vividly imagines Jonah's post-whale blues:
"...[T]here comes
a point. The whale completes his mission
and he spits you out. God's plan concludes
and he spits you out. The whale and God
go missing. The whale and God
no longer come around....
So you begin to tell the story of your time
inside the whale, first to friends, then for pay.
How each night you scan the audience
sure the whale will show, sure that God
will show. How you are looking
while you are talking...."
How original, how absurd, and yet how touching this image of Jonah's eyes searching the audience for the whale!
"Then, at the end of the night, the pressure
shifts again and they come to shake your hand...
After all the talking and after shaking
all the hands, the night ends and you are left
with little except that God and the whale
were not here again..."
The story of Jonah and the whale has never felt so modern. Presenting a vision of modernity enwrapped in history, diversity enwrapped in unity, Olson's Boyishly is a fresh, compelling book I would recommend to anyone.
June 6, 2013
stunning book, inside and out. At first, because I did not know the author, I wondered if I was reading a book of persona poems. I was set straight. The poet's exploration of self and world is done from an intimate point of view, but many of these poems are about far more than just Olson. They bring the entire universe in with them, along for a precise, studied ride. If this book was a motorcycle and Olson the driver, you'd see things you've never seen, but there are no sudden moves or questionable risks here. This poet knows how to run a machine with precision.
March 18, 2024
Tanya Olson's "Boyishly" (published in 2013) is moving and hilarious. Nearly every poem has something special about it. This is a volume of poetry I'd recommend to anyone who feels intimidated by poetry or who thinks they "don't like contemporary poetry." There are poems written to John Brown; to Gertrude Stein from John Brown; about Muhammad Ali; and from the perspective of the prophet Jonah. Each poem captures something small and precious about living in human skin. Some highlights:
"Gates of Beauty" is a perfect poem, written from the perspective (I think) of a cultural revolutionary from a Communist regime who hopes to implement something called "The People's Act of Love." She has trouble implementing the policy, however, because reality throws all kinds of obstacles at her.
"Lady Wonder" tells the story of a psychic horse who can read the minds of humans. The horse becomes a sensation; she is hired to help people with their problems and to find missing children. Throughout the poem, she reflects on the lives and desires of the people whose minds she reads. At the poem's conclusion, Olson writes:
"Lady rubs her rump against a tree,
then gums the apple off the ground.
She wonders of warning the tups and ewes
humans think their grief unique
and the world is mostly water."
And then there's the final line of the volume, from "Absolutely a Particle, Absolutely a Wave," a poem about modern physics and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:
"This will continue until nothing changes. There are no openings in perfect circles.
It is bittersweet to live by principle; I wonder what it feels like to be victorious in war?"
I'm not sure if Olson means that living by principle is bittersweet, or if living itself is, by principle, bittersweet. Either way, it's probably true.
"Gates of Beauty" is a perfect poem, written from the perspective (I think) of a cultural revolutionary from a Communist regime who hopes to implement something called "The People's Act of Love." She has trouble implementing the policy, however, because reality throws all kinds of obstacles at her.
"Lady Wonder" tells the story of a psychic horse who can read the minds of humans. The horse becomes a sensation; she is hired to help people with their problems and to find missing children. Throughout the poem, she reflects on the lives and desires of the people whose minds she reads. At the poem's conclusion, Olson writes:
"Lady rubs her rump against a tree,
then gums the apple off the ground.
She wonders of warning the tups and ewes
humans think their grief unique
and the world is mostly water."
And then there's the final line of the volume, from "Absolutely a Particle, Absolutely a Wave," a poem about modern physics and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:
"This will continue until nothing changes. There are no openings in perfect circles.
It is bittersweet to live by principle; I wonder what it feels like to be victorious in war?"
I'm not sure if Olson means that living by principle is bittersweet, or if living itself is, by principle, bittersweet. Either way, it's probably true.
March 9, 2025
A collection of (mostly) persona-ish poems.
from Notes from Jonah's Lecture Series: "From inside the whale, you cannot guide / the whale. A whale will do what a whale will do. / You may throw your body to one side / or another to try to steer the whale: / you may attempt to use the power / of your mind to influence the whale. / Your mind is of a greater capacity / than the whale's mind, but again, / a whale will do what a whale will do."
from Slave to the Virgin: "Bound his body to learn his body. / Learned his body to forget / his body. How else to get to empty. / How else to reach freedom but by journey."
from What Else: "I thought / being elsewhere. Made me / a different boy. As a boy with a gun and a different tongue. I thought / returning home. Would bring me home."
from Notes from Jonah's Lecture Series: "From inside the whale, you cannot guide / the whale. A whale will do what a whale will do. / You may throw your body to one side / or another to try to steer the whale: / you may attempt to use the power / of your mind to influence the whale. / Your mind is of a greater capacity / than the whale's mind, but again, / a whale will do what a whale will do."
from Slave to the Virgin: "Bound his body to learn his body. / Learned his body to forget / his body. How else to get to empty. / How else to reach freedom but by journey."
from What Else: "I thought / being elsewhere. Made me / a different boy. As a boy with a gun and a different tongue. I thought / returning home. Would bring me home."
April 8, 2016
This is edited from my introduction of Olson at the Pratt Library on 4/5/16. The reading (with Lia Purpura, also incredible) was absolutely phenomenal:
I give you the context of her education not only because it’s standard - Olson has published articles on the intersections of sexuality and Irish literature and composition pedagogy - but because it colors the critique of present culture embedded in understanding of the past. These are sweeping America poems – poems that consider myth of the everyday. As written in “My Love is Green, America,” it’s the “imagining a person they wish they could be.” These poems examine a cognitive dissonance within human nature. We want to be more than we are. Here are some adjectives that we’ll have more context for soon (aka read the book!): brutal and clear, moving and hilarious, like Gertrude Stein or Bernadette Mayer or Hannah Gamble. Because in the end, to quote Olson, poetry is to perhaps “help the world to see as we have seen.”
I really love this book. "My Love is Green, America" blows me away. Olson recited the poem - the audience was like WHERE CAN WE READ THAT POEM OVER AND OVER.
I give you the context of her education not only because it’s standard - Olson has published articles on the intersections of sexuality and Irish literature and composition pedagogy - but because it colors the critique of present culture embedded in understanding of the past. These are sweeping America poems – poems that consider myth of the everyday. As written in “My Love is Green, America,” it’s the “imagining a person they wish they could be.” These poems examine a cognitive dissonance within human nature. We want to be more than we are. Here are some adjectives that we’ll have more context for soon (aka read the book!): brutal and clear, moving and hilarious, like Gertrude Stein or Bernadette Mayer or Hannah Gamble. Because in the end, to quote Olson, poetry is to perhaps “help the world to see as we have seen.”
I really love this book. "My Love is Green, America" blows me away. Olson recited the poem - the audience was like WHERE CAN WE READ THAT POEM OVER AND OVER.
December 2, 2014
LOVED this. Not usually my style of writing--in terms of consumption and production--but so incredibly wonderful. Funny and odd and moving. Highly recommended.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews