Unravel: Poems [Paperback]

Finalist for the 2025 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry • Finalist for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry • A Calgary Herald bestseller • Named a Best Canadian Poetry Book of 2025 by CBC Books

A poetic exploration of the cyclical philosophy of dismantling and remaking, Unravel is a moving and inventive rove through what could happen in the deconstructed aftermath of person and world.Finalist for the 2025 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry • Finalist for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry • A Calgary Herald bestseller • Named a Best Canadian Poetry Book of 2025 by CBC Books

“Although composed of ever fragmenting parts, Unravel feels complete. Grounded in centuries of literary and scientific references—from the Bible to Jacques Derrida and contemporary therapists—these lines are dense and reinvigorating. ‘I became a question // for myself,’ Oloruntoba writes, quoting Saint Augustine, whose Confessions are felt throughout this similarly forceful and expansive record of self-exploration.”
—Literary Review of Canada

“Oloruntoba’s use of forms such as the cento and the found poem is indicative of the volume’s overall tendency to unravel historic approaches or understandings and recombine them . . . On a linguistic level, this unravelling takes the form of breaking down binaries (see, for example, the early poem “Contronym”) and locating the play in syntactical forms.”
—Quill & Quire

“For everyone l‘