BOOKS BY BRIAN OLIU
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What Shot Did You Ever Take
The Hunger Press, 2021
What Shot Did You Ever Take is a poetry collaboration with Jason Mccall on boxing, masculinty, race, and humanity, through the lens of the Rocky film series.
Body Drop: Notes on Fandom and Pain in Professional Wrestling
978-1-4696-6341-8
University of North Carolina Press, 2021
Body Drop looks deeply at the nuances of professional wrestling and its strange place within American culture. Brian Oliu offers deeply personal meditations on such topics as disability, chronic pain, body image, masculinity, class, and more, all through the lens of American professional wrestling.
i/o
ISBN-1937865541
Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2015
i/o is a memoir written in the form of a computer virus, examining the author's personal journey and struggles through the lens of Odysseus' journey in The Odyssey.
Part epic poem and part MS-DOS prompt, i/o was published by Civil Coping Mechanisms in 2015, and exists online at ioamemoir.com.
Enter Your Initials For Record Keeping
ISBN-978-1-941462-12-6
Cobalt Press, 2015
In this always-on-fire collection of essays on the classic 2-on-2 video game NBA Jam, Brian Oliu and 13 Player 2 contributors offer essays that explore the purest love and hatred for the game of basketball. While Oliu tells of his continuous battle with identity—particularly due to the overwhelmingly large shadow of his father’s basketball abilities, as well as Brian’s own seemingly larger-than-life size as a child—Player 2 authors provide an eclectic balance of comic and tragic stories about the teams that represent them.
Leave Luck To Heaven
ISBN-978-1-9348199-9-9
Uncanny Valley Press, 2014
Leave Luck to Heaven is a collection of lyric essays with haunted, haunting reflections on classic games: they are the weird, painful things we made NES games carry for us because we didn’t know where else to put them.
Portions of Leave Luck to Heaven were published in Level End, a chapbook published by Origami Zoo Press in 2013.
So You Know It's Me
ISBN-9780983562504
Tiny Hardcore Press, 2011
So You Know It’s Me is a collection of lyric essays that were posted on the Tuscaloosa Craigslist Missed Connections board over the course of 45 days. On the 45th day, in accordance to Craigslist policy, the essays began to erase themselves.
So You Know It's Me was published by Roxane Gay's Tiny Hardcore Press in 2011, and now exists online at soyouknowitsme.com
Come See For Yourself
ISBN-9780983562542
Tiny Hardcore Press, 2012
Come See For Yourself is a series of stories about each county of Brian Oliu’s home state of New Jersey. Each piece tries to encompass the strangeness of the Garden State by retelling the stories of both the author and those who call New Jersey home. From the Jersey Shore to the Delaware Water Gap to the Ironbound to the Pine Barrens, the odd landscapes provide a backdrop for Oliu’s quest to pinpoint what makes a place that can be so foreign feel like home.
Come See For Yourself was originally published in The Fullness of Everything by Tiny Hardcore Press in 2012 and now resides on Google Maps.