The McKoy Twins Syncopated Star is a set of five sonnets written by Tyehimba Jess and are in his 2015 Pulitzer Prize winning collection Olio. The poems were written in such a way that they can be read from top to bottom, bottom to top, side to side, diagonally, and even across the different sonnets-while maintaining syntactical clarity. Without repeating lines in any given sonnet, this means that there are ​4472027100598895036559360000 different ways of reading the Syncopated Star. This JavaScript generator randomly generates any one of these possible iterations.


Created by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram with assistance from Dennison Bertram.