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Unravel: Poems
“These are poems of deep thought, passionate engagement, and often searing images.” —Toronto Star (on Each One a Furnace)
A poetic exploration of the cyclical philosophy of dismantling—and remaking—the self from Griffin Poetry Prize winner Tolu Oloruntoba.
Moving and inventive, Unravel deals with the multiple ways in which a person and world can be deconstructed, and what could happen in the aftermath.
A poetic exploration of the cyclical philosophy of dismantling—and remaking—the self from Griffin Poetry Prize winner Tolu Oloruntoba.
Moving and inventive, Unravel deals with the multiple ways in which a person and world can be deconstructed, and what could happen in the aftermath.
- GenresPoetry
120 pages, Paperback
Published March 25, 2025
4 people are currently reading
39 people want to read
About the author
Tolu Oloruntoba
4 books17 followersTolu Oloruntoba was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, and practiced medicine before his current work managing projects for BC health authorities.
His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Harvard Divinity Bulletin, PRISM International, Pleiades, Columbia Journal Online, Obsidian, The Maynard, and the Humber Literary Review, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
His debut chapbook, Manubrium, was published by Anstruther Press, and was shortlisted for the 2020 bpNichol Chapbook Award.
A full-length collection of his poetry, The Junta of Happenstance, is forthcoming from Anstruther Books in Spring 2021.
He lives in Surrey, BC, in the territories of the Semiahmoo, Katzie, and Kwantlen First Nations.
His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Harvard Divinity Bulletin, PRISM International, Pleiades, Columbia Journal Online, Obsidian, The Maynard, and the Humber Literary Review, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
His debut chapbook, Manubrium, was published by Anstruther Press, and was shortlisted for the 2020 bpNichol Chapbook Award.
A full-length collection of his poetry, The Junta of Happenstance, is forthcoming from Anstruther Books in Spring 2021.
He lives in Surrey, BC, in the territories of the Semiahmoo, Katzie, and Kwantlen First Nations.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 14, 2025
I need to start reading books by the same poet back to back. It was such a wonderful experience to watch Oloruntoba's craft evolve and the poems themselves deepen and spread, stylistically and thematically. There is a richness to this third collection that is exciting and also rewarding as a reader who is following Oloruntoba's success and growth as a poet.
August 31, 2025
Tolo Oloruntoba’s collection of poetry, “Unravel” is an ambitious range of allusion and theme executed with success and mastery of literary prowess. This collection would serve a University syllabus well in a space of literary study and collective close readings. I know, each time this collection is picked up, a new understanding can be gleaned from carefully layered details and play on language. With a rich range of topics, organized into two parts and professing 93 poems in prose pieces, concrete poetry and stanza, “Unravel” is bound to achieve success and respect amongst the Canlit canon. Forms of poetry like the cento and found poem further exemplify the writer’s ability in deconstructing and crafting meaning in a recombination of depth and capacity.
Published in the spring of 2025 by McClelland & Stewart, “Unravel” has presented as a rich and complex text to reviewers. One reviewer commented that “Tolu Oloruntoba appears to be writing an exegesis of everything in one hundred pages of poems in two equivalent sections.” Another reviewer states, “It’s a dynamic collection impossible to pin down but about which I can provide some descriptions that hopefully point to certain forces of a ground-breaking work.” Lastly, “I cannot say I unraveled all of its depths, I really admire the poet’s ambition as if self identity was a city “falling into a sea”, and still there are acolytes and myriad allusions singing in the vaulted cathedrals we try to build of our poems.” In contributing to these conversations, I too felt the layers and depths of the collection that I could not fully unpack everything. At first, I was intimidated to write a proper review on this work, until I sat with the collection more and looked in places that had not yet been analyzed by other reviewers.
Tolo Oloruntoba is a writer from Ibadan, Nigeria who now resides in Alberta. In Nigeria he studied and practiced medicine, describing himself on his website as a lapsed physician. He is the author of two poetry collections, “The Junta of Happentance,” which was the winner of the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2021 Governor General’s Literary Award. His second collection, “Each One a Furnace” was a Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize finalist. Oloruntoba is the founder of the literary magazine Klorofyl and author of the chapbook, “Manubrium,” which was shortlisted for the 2020 bpNichol Chapbook Award.
Oloruntoba infuses his collection with theoretical frameworks of decentring, drawing on Derrida’s concept of destabilizing established linguistic and intellectual hierarchies by foregrounding marginalized perspectives and opening space for what Derrida described as the “infinite play of signification.” This strategy not only challenges dominant cultural narratives but also positions Oloruntoba’s work within a dynamic interpretive field where meaning remains fluid and constantly renegotiated. Unravelling as a process, “I have raveled; have unraveled./ Have done and been undone.” And yet, in that fluidity of change between coming undone and rebuilding, Oloruntoba retains a core of being. “Pit: a hollow, or solid,/ at the center, or the membrane between village and villain.” Simultaneously, he is solid and severed: “why the earthworm,/ exiled from its other half,/ never stops reaching.” And what resonated with me, as I have called upon this imagery in my own writing, “I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain.” My character became Sisyphus, a father figure, forever pushing the stone of inter-generational trauma uphill, not Oloruntoba.
Many reviewers have felt that they will not fully unpack “Unravel.” One review stuck with me that Oloruntoba had created a ‘personal myth’ of himself with this collection.
“Unravel is a book I had to read multiple times, and I’m not sure I understand everything the poet Oloruntoba is saying in this book, but Oloruntoba has written an ambitious collection in terms of wordplay, and how the individual poems dissect his personal identity as poet, father, immigrant; and at least for me, the real gift of this collection is its wealth of history and allusions and old stories. I think Tolu Oloruntoba in Unravel is constructing his own personal myth–one he can live with.”
To negotiate self within the placement of the world. Oloruntoba writes:
“This work is to re-pare, make ready with the knife again. Cruel man that I am, I prefer my singers/ broken. No worse than those who like their poets/ fragile, scared, thrumming with the terror of being/ alive. Disentangle my self concept. The earth will/ wear out like a garment and of my body, not one/ stone will be left upon another.”
Unravel, as in fully destroy. As in, after we are gone, we risk loss of greatness anyways.
That understanding brought me to the analysis of the cover of the collection. Created by [name of person who designed the cover], “Unravel” is embossed with a picture of the broken nose statue of Amenemhat III. An Egyptian ruler of the golden age who’s legacy and deterioration of power after death embodies unraveling. His reign is remembered for this unravelling, a slow unravelling of the Middle Kingdom after his death. His pyramids collapsed, his dynasty weakened. A writer could call upon Amenemhat III’s legacy of domination and a dynasty coming apart. The embossed image of a museum artifact, once a whole statue, now, we receive this image as broken, incomplete and literally unravelled through time. How would Amenemhat III feel, greeting us with a broken nose? A pharaoh pushing for immortality, a stone statue, the monument of legacy, like poetry, what we leave behind when we are gone.
Thank you to Tolu Oloruntoba, McClelland & Stewart and River Street Writing for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!
https://www.sarahailstone.com/book-re...
Published in the spring of 2025 by McClelland & Stewart, “Unravel” has presented as a rich and complex text to reviewers. One reviewer commented that “Tolu Oloruntoba appears to be writing an exegesis of everything in one hundred pages of poems in two equivalent sections.” Another reviewer states, “It’s a dynamic collection impossible to pin down but about which I can provide some descriptions that hopefully point to certain forces of a ground-breaking work.” Lastly, “I cannot say I unraveled all of its depths, I really admire the poet’s ambition as if self identity was a city “falling into a sea”, and still there are acolytes and myriad allusions singing in the vaulted cathedrals we try to build of our poems.” In contributing to these conversations, I too felt the layers and depths of the collection that I could not fully unpack everything. At first, I was intimidated to write a proper review on this work, until I sat with the collection more and looked in places that had not yet been analyzed by other reviewers.
Tolo Oloruntoba is a writer from Ibadan, Nigeria who now resides in Alberta. In Nigeria he studied and practiced medicine, describing himself on his website as a lapsed physician. He is the author of two poetry collections, “The Junta of Happentance,” which was the winner of the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2021 Governor General’s Literary Award. His second collection, “Each One a Furnace” was a Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize finalist. Oloruntoba is the founder of the literary magazine Klorofyl and author of the chapbook, “Manubrium,” which was shortlisted for the 2020 bpNichol Chapbook Award.
Oloruntoba infuses his collection with theoretical frameworks of decentring, drawing on Derrida’s concept of destabilizing established linguistic and intellectual hierarchies by foregrounding marginalized perspectives and opening space for what Derrida described as the “infinite play of signification.” This strategy not only challenges dominant cultural narratives but also positions Oloruntoba’s work within a dynamic interpretive field where meaning remains fluid and constantly renegotiated. Unravelling as a process, “I have raveled; have unraveled./ Have done and been undone.” And yet, in that fluidity of change between coming undone and rebuilding, Oloruntoba retains a core of being. “Pit: a hollow, or solid,/ at the center, or the membrane between village and villain.” Simultaneously, he is solid and severed: “why the earthworm,/ exiled from its other half,/ never stops reaching.” And what resonated with me, as I have called upon this imagery in my own writing, “I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain.” My character became Sisyphus, a father figure, forever pushing the stone of inter-generational trauma uphill, not Oloruntoba.
Many reviewers have felt that they will not fully unpack “Unravel.” One review stuck with me that Oloruntoba had created a ‘personal myth’ of himself with this collection.
“Unravel is a book I had to read multiple times, and I’m not sure I understand everything the poet Oloruntoba is saying in this book, but Oloruntoba has written an ambitious collection in terms of wordplay, and how the individual poems dissect his personal identity as poet, father, immigrant; and at least for me, the real gift of this collection is its wealth of history and allusions and old stories. I think Tolu Oloruntoba in Unravel is constructing his own personal myth–one he can live with.”
To negotiate self within the placement of the world. Oloruntoba writes:
“This work is to re-pare, make ready with the knife again. Cruel man that I am, I prefer my singers/ broken. No worse than those who like their poets/ fragile, scared, thrumming with the terror of being/ alive. Disentangle my self concept. The earth will/ wear out like a garment and of my body, not one/ stone will be left upon another.”
Unravel, as in fully destroy. As in, after we are gone, we risk loss of greatness anyways.
That understanding brought me to the analysis of the cover of the collection. Created by [name of person who designed the cover], “Unravel” is embossed with a picture of the broken nose statue of Amenemhat III. An Egyptian ruler of the golden age who’s legacy and deterioration of power after death embodies unraveling. His reign is remembered for this unravelling, a slow unravelling of the Middle Kingdom after his death. His pyramids collapsed, his dynasty weakened. A writer could call upon Amenemhat III’s legacy of domination and a dynasty coming apart. The embossed image of a museum artifact, once a whole statue, now, we receive this image as broken, incomplete and literally unravelled through time. How would Amenemhat III feel, greeting us with a broken nose? A pharaoh pushing for immortality, a stone statue, the monument of legacy, like poetry, what we leave behind when we are gone.
Thank you to Tolu Oloruntoba, McClelland & Stewart and River Street Writing for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!
https://www.sarahailstone.com/book-re...
September 3, 2025
What an interesting collection! Oloruntoba writes from a perspective of reexamining and reengaging his faith. Frequent allusions to the Bible, to deconstructionist texts, to Nigerian, Canadian, and American (and evangelical) cultures, and to current medical research. I read this slowly because it is challenging but also thought provoking. I highly recommend this poetry.
July 29, 2025
sorry this is overdue AS HELL at the vancouver public library
June 26, 2025
Tolu Oloruntoba burst onto the scene in 2021 with his debut poetry collection The Junta of Happenstance (Anstruther Books/Palimpsest Press), winning both the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Griffin Poetry Prize in the same year (one of only two poets to achieve this feat, the other being Roo Borson for Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida in 2005). Each One a Furnace (M&S) followed a year later, also appearing on an impressive array of shortlists. Clearly, Oloruntoba is a poet who cannot be ignored. Unravel (M&S, 2025), his third collection, cements this fact. A soaring paean to the constant need to make and remake the self in an unstable world, Unravel by Tolu Oloruntoba is one of this year’s absolute must-reads!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews