So You Know It's Me

THIS BOOK IS A HUGE FUCKING DEAL.

I don’t want you to guess what I was drinking. I was drinking Earl Gray tea. I was drinking Earl Gray tea and I was reading Brian Oliu’s new book SO YOU KNOW IT’S ME when you and your strong lavender approached. You were wearing cut-off jean shorts. You had a thing in your hair, maybe chopsticks, scissored. You were squeezing a copy of a book about water. You had a funny look in your eyes, like your eyes were broken, dangling—maybe your eyes were cleaning windows on the skyscraper of you [...]

Oliu's lyric Craigslist ads, taken in total, add up to the portrait of a deeply perceptive man whose gaze of the women he is fascinated by resonates long after this book is over. The front cover of our POV looking through a window at a party or gathering also plays into how these passages unfold: man seeking woman, man on the outside, man as stranger, as forgotten.

I read this in the morning while sitting in the garden.June 14 in Arizona: high of 103° today--and still I felt wave after wave of goosebumps as I made my way through this book.It is a beautiful thing.

omggggg

Okay so this was a really interesting concept. Missed Connections as a story. Really great and really touching. The best part of all this was buried deep in the last one, a line so easy to miss if you weren't paying attention.This, here, will disappear like the others. There will be other connections, others after youI doubled back and read the description: On the 45th day, in accordance to Craigslistpolicy, the essays began to erase themselves

It's ridiculously stingy of me to mention this, but it needs to be said: of the purported 45 short essays Oliu posted on Craiglist, this includes only half, the odd numbered ones.That said, the essays themselves, short and lyrical, are dynamic and moving, trying to reach out to connect with a figure, or several different figures-- the tone moderates between comic and more serious, but is more than that consistently inventive in the sentences and syntax Oliu uses. There is an echo of Martone's wr [...]

I may be biased but it didn't really matter. I didn't really know what to expect getting into it. I just knew it was written via Cragslist's Missed Connections. At first maybe I was expecting it to be funnier than it came across. I think I thought they would all be fictional for humor's sake, but as I kept reading them I kept feeling more and more that behind each entry there really was a girl. It turned out at the end I was kind of right and it was also a little bit sadder than I was expecting. [...]

Oliu’s missed connections could be any person out there, a person receiving attention from someone who over-thinks a little too often and sometimes wonders if he remembers too much. The tone of each essay is slightly obsessive and sad, yet beautiful in their moments of sincere flattery. I enjoyed the book a lot, and though I appreciate the structure, I thought by the end, Ah, just let us have one more…(My full review can be found on Word Riot.)

I read this for the third or maybe fourth time this fall and thought, how does he do it? These pieces are so witty and amazing. One of my favorite books of short fiction, compressed like a master, and with a take-away longer than the Mississippi River. Don't wait, get it. And if you feel like "huh?" on the first read, give it a second shot. Take your time. Slow down. This book will make you want to.

Brian Oliu writes in So You Know It's Me, again and again, "This is about you." And it is. It's about all of us. And what we miss, again and again. My favorites: "Roll," "In Motion," "Frozen," "Cinchoism," "The Walk Home," "Construct," "Replay," "Penultimate," and "The End." And "M4W," because it's meta.

So far, so spectacular. LOVING this. Short posts that originally appeared on Craigslist's "Missed Connections" site. Poetic, powerful vignettes that are blowing my mind and restoring my faith that great work is getting published (albeit by extremely small publishers).

These are quirky, demanding, pressing pieces that are, as a whole, a great example of how second-person narrative can work (it usually doesn't) and how accusatory language functions when it is in its prime (as it is in Oliu's hands).

4.5/5 This book was so powerful, disturbing, and well-crafted. The form heightened the desperation so that by the end I could not lift my eyes off the page. I can't wait to re-read this gem over the weekend.

Read our review in the October/November 2011 issue of Shelf Magazine. pagegangster/p/3YczN/

vouchedbooks/2011/06/08/i-

Relentlessly sincere, glimmers with a musical kind of clarity; gut-punch after achy-lovely gut-punch.

Fucking beautiful