tuscaloosa > personals > missed connections

So You Know It's Me - Brian Oliu

Original Publication Date: 2011-05-19, 11:22PM CST

“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 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.

A print version, "So You Know It's Me" was published in May of 2011 by Tiny Hardcore Press and edited by Roxane Gay.

When I worked on "So You Know It's Me," I felt the temporalness of the project--I knew that when things were posted on the Craiglist board, they would eventually disappear. My intention was for readers to come across the work on the website--when it was gone, it was gone. I was approached by Roxane to compile the pieces into a limited edition book, and for that I am eternally grateful, as it allowed the pieces to take an entirely different shape and perscribe a new meaning to the work.

With the book now being out of print, as well as the death of the Craigslist's Personals Section, I figured it was time to resurrect the project in digital form in an attempt to recreate the experience of coming across the pieces during that summer of 2010.

I hope that you enjoy revisiting these pieces, and, for those experiencing them for the first time, I'm glad that we haven't missed each other.

Warmly,
Brian Oliu
May 2018

Location: Tuscaloosa, Alabama
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