"The Junta of Happenstance" by Tolu Oloruntoba

Tolu Oloruntoba's debut poetry collection The Junta of Happenstance was published in May by Palimpsest Press. I'm thrilled to help bring the book a little more fully into the nearly-post-COVID world by having him read with me (and Dallas Hunt and Shaun Robinson) at the August "Strangers Summer Series" event (a free outdoor event, though advance registration is required). 

In a recent interview for Prism International, Tolu (rather delightfully) said:

A poem is never done. You either get it published or you keep editing it whenever you stumble on to it, until you die. I often replace words or edit small aspects of poems that have been published, when I have to read them publicly. There’s always something that could be said better, often because of the clarity that time away from the work builds. Having said this, I often sense I am done with the poem when I get a sigh-like feeling, a feeling like I have said all I could say at the time, as well as I could say it, while being faithful to what I had in mind.

Here's a poem from the book, "Co-exist", which was clearly long-edited but also contains that sigh-like feeling of accomplishment:

Co-exist - Tolu Oloruntoba

Africans never presume to count another’s children,
so we don’t know how many they had, the family
ours moved in with, each sidestepping the other.
Mostly. Avoidance was respect: night was their time,
the musical clan tapdancing ceiling boards to pipes,
and winching squeaks from plumbing, chorus stars
above, cosmic dust, pointilist, in sifted asbestos below.
You would go into their kitchen at night for water
and see their conspiracy scattering, snooker balls
struck by light, darting stragglers huffing for the pocket
hole. Easy, having nibbled their doors under ours,
thoroughfare through the house and gourmet gougings
of bread, each mousehole ornate. Losing their shyness,
we occasionally met at dusk, their whiskers tightrope
lances measuring the abyss of air on either side,
sifting our intention, teaching the resonance of mice:
while the world continues to build ours at the edge,
to wrench our microcosm from potential space.

That "sifted asbestos"!  Those "darting stragglers huffing for the pocket / hole"! Tolu's poetry is alive with sound, and so much more, as his press summarises nicely:
 

Personal, primordial, and pulsing with syncopated language, Tolu Oloruntoba’s poetic debut, The Junta of Happenstance, is a compendium of dis-ease. This includes disease in the traditional sense, as informed by the poet’s time as a physician, and dis-ease as a primer for family dysfunction, the (im)migrant experience, and urban / corporate anxiety. In the face of struggles against social injustice, Oloruntoba navigates the contemporary moment with empathy and intelligence, finding beauty in chaos, and strength in suffering. The Junta of Happenstance is an important and assured debut.

Do pick up a copy of the book, either online from the Palimpsest Press website, or from your local bookstore, or in person on Wednesday, April 11th from Tolu himself!

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Tolu Oloruntoba is the author of the Anstruther Press chapbook Manubrium. His poetry has appeared in Pleiades, Columbia Journal, Entropy, and other publications, and his short fiction has appeared in translation in Dansk PEN Magazine. He founded Klorofyl, a magazine of literary and graphic art, and practiced medicine before his current work managing projects for health authorities in British Columbia. After a somewhat itinerant life in Nigeria and the United States, he emigrated to the Greater Vancouver Area, where he lives with his family.