Tolu Oloruntoba, Unravel

 

RE-CLAIM

I am the city falling into the sea.
but there remain acolytes in me,
singing in the cathedrals,
voices sanded with phlegm,
Though he slay me, yet
will I trust him. They are wrong
to trust me. If I know why
their world is ending, or why
it began; if I know the reason,
or the consequence of their lives;
if I know the spin-direction
of their dwindling cosmos,
I have not told them.
I have not revealed myself.

The third full-length poetry title by award-winning poet Tolu Oloruntoba, following The Junta of Happenstance (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2021) and Each One a Furnace (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2022), is Unravel (McClelland and Stewart, 2025). There is a powerful navigation Oloruntoba works through his lyric first-person narratives, offering deeply thoughtful meditations on all that might be called location. “Shrill bullets, sheep ballet, this hobble:,” he offers, as part of the poem “OF PASSPHRASES STRONGER THAN 4 WORDS WITH / 1,000 ITERATIONS,” “I still cannot pronounce shibboleth. / I wanted into the cult of ikigai like nothing // before or since. If I had been so punished, / then I must have been righteous, and my reward / must have waited.” These poems attempt placement, attempting to best situate his thinking, and articulate how he sees the chaos and beauty of the world through his engagements through, as Reginald Dwayne Betts suggests, as part of his back cover blurb, “the intersections of identity, migration, fatherhood, and history.” These are poems about how best one might move through the world, despite and even because of all it contains, both without and within. These are poems on perspective: “You’d consider that map / upside-down,” he writes, as part of “MAGIC LAND OF THE SHADOWS,” “but only because / you believe Europe belongs on top.”

Oloruntoba offers deep attention to the smallest moments, small things, which allow for larger revelation; the only way, perhaps, to get there from here. “I have been troubling / the shoreline,” he writes, as part of the poem “EKPHRASIS,” “as cryptids do.” There is an informed and steady progress of thought across Oloruntoba’s lyric, deeply considered and gestural; wise and empathetic, even as he unravels—as to reveal, and not to pull apart, damage or dismantle—his own observations for the sake of further insight. “We / who are at our most human when / we are yearning.” he writes, as part of “DEMONSTRO,” “My Cain-mark, your / Cain-mark, shows even, especially / in this gropesome dark.”

There was, at least to my eyes, a curious way that Oloruntoba appeared, seemingly out of nowhere with a debut collection that quickly landed multiple award nominations, with a second title even before his first won both the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Griffin Poetry Prize. Impressive, certainly, and this collection holds not only a weight of expectation but manages to surpass it, setting down new markers across a familiar landscape of lyric thinking, offering a freshness of thought and speech. “to be both flammable and / inflammable,” he writes, to open the poem “CONTRONYM,” “valuable and invaluable / is to understand that one can buckle / a thing down so it does not buckle, / can be a sharp stone under / the ravaging heel of gravity.”