Blue Collar Holiday & A Valentine To Frank O'Hara [Paperback]

Jeni Olin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 30, 2005

"...Olins voice is both raw and strangely accommodating. This is a marvelous debut."-John Asbherry "Jeni Olin's poems are packed with emotional incident and strong, sometimes turbulent, feelings that she illuminates with ironic immediacy and brilliant insouciance..."-Tony Towle "...never veering far from her 'base,' her soul, it is both blindingly accurate and viscerally compelling poetry." - Darragh Park.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The improvisatory energies of downtown Manhattan mix with the volatility of youth in Olin's entertaining two-part debut. Part one compiles 28 chattily lyrical poems, many of them with comic or topical titles ("Tom Brokaw," "The World Was Naughty Last Night"). Several respond to color prints, drawings or paintings (all reproduced) by the eminent New York artist Larry Rivers, with whom Olin collaborated before his death in 2002. Olin's free verse switches easily between sarcasm and joy, registering quick changes in her adopted city: "On a clear day you can see forever-/ At Lenscrafters you can be fitted in about an hour." Olin elsewhere jokes about her own non sequiturs, flexing her line and playing the alert reader much as a fisherman might play trout: "Anything I do will be an abuse of somebody's aesthetics," she declares. These outbursts and confidences (and Manhattan details) show the influence of Frank O'Hara, himself a friend of Rivers decades ago; O'Hara's presence becomes perhaps too explicit in part two, "A Valentine for Frank O'Hara," which incorporates swaths of O'Hara's own verse.
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Review

There are many things to admire about Jeni Olin's BLUE COLLAR HOLIDAY, but to me the most striking is the expansive, inclusive "one moment" feeling that permeates all the poems. ...Olins poems create a space for the mundane humor of the everyday to be played off against larger forces- "there are fates/ Far worse than blackness, the clap. Though/ Nobody knows what they are" (a riff on Somerset Maugham's advice about novel-writing)- and for life's rich, silly pageant and death's shittiness to exist together. Olin understands how theme, emotion and intention can be manipulated to create and almost mathematical interlock within the line. These skillful blendings are never without humor, and often rock lyrics act as a binding: " New York will not accept me at this weight &/ Mothers of the disappeared don't come 'round/ Here anymore"; "Mama take this pepper spray from me-/ I can't defame the minions tonight"; Well-hung and snow-white trash./ The furniture was heavy failing also." And while there is much spontaneity in these seeming throwaways, nothing is ever thrown out just because. ...The loves of BLUE COLLAR HOLIDAY(which are not always the poet's, I dont think) are winderful and problematic- " A love flared yesterday in Flushing, Queens/ Expired amid diet ginger ale and racy gladiolas"; "It would be so easy to stay but./ Was it Sal Mineo in the doorframe?/ I knew you felt like that./ & so my hell is hardly there" ; You could never leave me alone and then you could"- and this " one moment" of love and loss is accessed again and again here with compassion and accommodation right up until the last four words, which bring the beneditcion: "what I work with." --Poetry Project Newsletter, December 2006/January 2006 by Sharon Mesmer

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Product Details

• Paperback: 72 pages
• Publisher: Hanging Loose Press (April 30, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1931236496
• ISBN-13: 978-1931236492
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.8 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,808,700 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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