The Junta of Happenstance

by Tolu Oloruntoba

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781989287736
Publisher:	Palimpsest Press
Publication date:	05/15/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	104
File size:	920 KB

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

I.

Lookout 11

Expunge 12

Under Thunder 13

Moose 15

Mantis Corps 16

Tinderbox 17

Medical Séances 18

Amplitude 19

A History of Treachery 21

Heretic 28

Heretic: Taken 29

Ode to the Helix 31

Manubrium 32

Grove 33

She Says- 34

A Finger in the Eye Should Do It 36

We Will Have Questions 37

Patrimonial 38

II.

Child at Sleep 41

Co-exist 42

Incursus 43

Pattern Recognition 44

Mangonel v. Exocraft 45

Feud(al) 46

Has Anyone Studied This? 51

If, Goatherds 52

Optic Chiasm 53

Via Negativa 54

Please Stand Clear of the Doors 55

Sieve 56

Hired Hands 57

Settlers' Effects 58

AD79 59

III.

The Creation of Man 63

Continental Want 64

Chaw 65

My Therapist Assesses Suicidal Ideation 67

Chuck Norris 68

When Migrants Gather to Enjoy 69

In Which I, Again, am Fighting My Way Out of Things 71

Green / House 72

Our Lady of Delivery Excellence 76

Bloodletting 77

Gambit / Salvator 78

Repair 79

Ballroom 81

IV.

Emerging 85

Why We Die 86

In Fetu 87

Medicine 89

Vinculum 91

If Tildes Approximate Wings for the Barrel I'm In 92

Sparus 94

Life by a Thousand Bandages 95

Acknowledgements 97

Notes and Attributions 101