Unravel

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. “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!