Each One a Furnace: Poems [Paperback]

Second Place Winner of the 2023 RCLAS Fred Cogswell Award For Excellence In Poetry

From the author of The Junta of Happenstance, here is a brilliant new collection of poems—a burning chronicle of passage and stillness and restlessness.

DOROTHY LIVESAY POETRY PRIZE, FINALIST
FRED COGSWELL AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN POETRY, LONGLIST


Each One a Furnace explores (im)migration, diasporas, transience, and instability by following the behaviour, and abundant variety, of finches. The often-migratory birds in these poems typify the unrest, and inability to rest, that animate the lives of billions in the modern world. Out of the register of ornithology, themes of difficulty, adversity, and migrancy, urban ennui, and the psychic struggles of diasporic peoples take shape as those unable to be at rest in the world take to improbable flight. 

Trailing the global mobility of birds, in urban and non-urban settings, in historical and contemporary contexts, and through the metaphysical and concrete, Each One a Furnace is a chronicle of struggle within, and between, cultures.Second Place Winner of the 2023 RCLAS Fred Cogswell Award For Excellence In Poetry

“The compendium of post-apocalyptic finches we meet in Tolu Oloruntoba’s Each One a Furnace seem to reach back to us from a not-so-distant future, to narrate the evolutionary burnout of most of the bird family Fringillidae. Imagine if a poem could be the collective knowledge of a species in the moment of its extinction, a translation of the painfully beautiful finale of all birdsong. ‘What lessons did you learn / about the transactional conviviality / of captive flocks?’ Oloruntoba’s finches, buntilC¥