World Literary Awards

← Back to awarded works
The Junta of Happenstance

Griffin Poetry Prize

The Junta of Happenstance

Tolu Oloruntoba

The Junta of Happenstance is a debut poetry collection that threads politics, migration, and chance through fragmentary imagery. With quiet anger and irony, it makes contemporary unease sharply visible.

poetry collectionmigrationpoliticschance

Work Information

A sharp-edged poetry collection where politics and contingency intersect.

Drawing on the author's experience as a physician, the debut collection compresses power, family, and urban pressure into compact poems. Its fragmentary structure moves between social unease and private perception.

Book Information

Publisher
Anstruther Books
Published
2021-05-01
Pages
103 pages
Language
英語
Size
13.97 x 0.76 x 21.59 cm
ISBN-13
9781989287729
ISBN-10
1989287727
Price
4051 JPY
Category
洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/African

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.

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.

Related Literary Awards