So You Know It's Me by Brian Oliu
Order from Tiny Hardcore Press
A review by Tyler Gobble on Vouched.
A review by Mel Bosworth on Outside Writers Collective.
A review by Ian Denning on PANK.
A review by Matthew Merendo on Hipster Book Club.
A review by Laura McCune Poplin on Necessary Fiction.
A review by Jennifer M. Kaufman on LitStack.
A review by Koty Neelis on Specter Magazine.
A review by Elizabeth Wade on The Lit Pub.
A review by Roxane Gay on The Lit Pub.
A review by Kim Liao on Ploughshares.
A review by Brian Carr on Dark Sky.
“Saw you on the morning bus reading a book, but it wasn’t Brian Oliu’s So You Know It’s Me. Too bad, really. Oliu’s book is playful, beautifully structured, filled with surprise and pleasure. Also: odd and wonderful. We might have had that relationship, you and I, had you read the book. Oliu’s book. Read it now, or you will miss out again.”
--Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic & Desire
“In So You Know It’s Me, Brian Oliu posits an ideal reader/missed connection/desired presence, all the while negotiating with the ever-eroding nature of time. Major ambitions for such a small book! Each brief meditation explores the daunting, existential task of searching (for you, whoever you are), and yet, with tender and earnest energy, retains a lover’s belief in the act of seeking. This playfully looping & arcing essay-sequence (intelligent rather than clever! graceful rather than trendily chaotic and jittery!) made this reader feel the acute pleasures of being both sought and found.”
—Lia Purpura, author of On Looking, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
'So You Know It's Me' is a collection of Missed Connections which I posted on the Tuscaloosa Craigslist board over the course of the summer of 2010: 22 missed connections over the course of 45 days. In accordance to Craigslist policy, the posts started erasing themselves after those 45 days.
When I originally posted these, I got a few responses: the high school girl who said I was a good writer and she hoped I found what I was looking for, and the two dudes who asked what I desired most, and the other who said that a painting that I made reference to was Van Gogh's 'Starry Night'. During my tenure on there, a guy & a girl found each other on there--of course it was at the Houndstooth, and of course the guy was interested because she was taking photographs of her two female friends making out, but hey, I'm not judging.
In a conversation with my good friend and fellow writer Elizabeth Wade about missed connections, I had mentioned that at first I found the notion of 'Missed Connections' kind of ludicrous and impossible and false--of course through our conversation I changed my tone--Elizabeth had mentioned that there is the idea that it all relies on place and time: that there are people out there who would have a place in our lives if things were different. As I thought about this, the shape of the project changed: that all missed connections are, in fact, connections, although often not on the level of an actual connection of genuine love and adoration. And so the pieces that make up the Missed Connections are about those connections and how they become something larger than an actual connection--that rather than 'choosing someone every single day', we choose something else out there that will sabotage our happiness. To think about these missed scenarios is extremely healthy--it makes you realize the life that you have and what can be done to make it even better. But to pine for them makes you ignore the life that you do live: to say if you're entirely relying on missed connections, you're going to miss every connection.
This isn't to say this is an argument against serendipity or being smart with love, but relying upon these missed connections is a very very real thing that we have all felt--it is us at our weakest and our most convinced.
This book was written well before the EF-4 tornado hit Tuscaloosa on April 27, 2011. In what can be described as bizarre timing, the amazing Roxane Gay & Tiny Hardcore Press picked up the book three days before the storm. I recognized that because of the tornado, the book has changed somehow--it is a love letter of sorts to Tuscaloosa, and now even moreso. A lot of the Missed Connections locations that are discussed here are gone now, which is an amazing thing to think about--not only the person/opportunity is gone, but there is no chance to even replicate the place.
I think often about a store I used to go to when I was a little kid back in NJ--it was a Jamesway; a catch-all store that was a pre-cursor to the Wal-Mart. This is where we did pretty much all of our shopping and I would go there twice, maybe three times a week. I remember certain parts of the store; mostly the check-out line where I could get candy, the small arcade (Ms. Pac-Man and a shoot-em-up game that I'm drawing a blank on the name), and the toy section, of course. The Jamesway is gone and has been for 15 years now, and for the life of me I cannot remember other parts of the store. I knew that I walked through them with my mother, pushing a mint green shopping cart. I have a vague recollection of where the trashcans were. Other than that, it is nothing, a blank void: things I remember and things I do not--a half created building.
I don't know what the brain does when it happens to an entire town. There's a joke in the south that people give directions based off of where things used to be--make a right at the old pool house, go past where the old Archibald & Woodrow's was. Is it going to be 'Where Alberta City used to be?' 'Where Forest Lake was?' What will be remembered?
I don't have an answer. What I do hope is that when it comes time to rebuild we will do this place proud--no more GameDay condos. No more abuse of tax breaks to contractors building $2000 a month rental properties. That everything is remembered because everything is worth remembering.
Friends have asked me about the book and if I should write an introduction now in the wake of the tornadoes. It's something I never thought about--there's no real introduction to anything: whether it's a missed connection or a disaster like this one. My professor Jane Satterfield once said "In a book of 63 poems, the 64th poem is the book itself." In this case, with 30% of our city gone and people working tirelessly to rebuild it, this tragedy is our final missed connection, and the one that is most lamented, yet the one most worthy of our remembrance.
Thank you for being interested in the book.
