Abstract: This essay explores one striking aspect of Tyehimba Jess’s Olio, namely, its “syncopated sonnets,” poems whose lines and half-lines can be read in any order, up or down or diagonally, as a reader wishes. Also, these poems, especially the ones written from the point of view the conjoined twins Millie and Christine McKoy, contain two or more voices that merge and separate, becoming partly but not wholly distinguishable. Olio opposes a temporality of forward movement — of progress, of narrative development — and licenses instead a wondering, wandering, and circling manner of movement, an inhabitation of a moment, and a collectivity outside the history and ideology of American white supremacy. Throughout, Jess explores what Anthony Reed has called freedom time, the recurrent effort in Black poetry to exit from history—as produced, codified, and policed by white colonizers — and enter into a temporality of radical possibility, where everything could be, and might have been, otherwise.

Key words: African American poetry, visual poetry, sonnets, poetry and historiography