Ara’luebo: The Immigrant Monologues
“Let me be whatever I name myself,” says one or perhaps more than one speaker toward the end of this deeply haunted and haunting book for those “who were called aliens in their own home.” From DC to Oakland to the whole “afterlife of America,” home is an ever-shifting experience, narrated and sung by an unforgettable cast of immigrant voices. The legacies and ongoing violences of colonialism, imperialism, and racism are real—but also real, very real, are the powers of language and love. In these poems love is language, the most inventive and soulful. At the same time, love is reckoning with history and confronting the self/selves. Love is the brilliance of this brilliant poet’s rage: “Rage against / the dying of your light & when you are long gone, / I swear this to you: You will live on in my rage.”
– Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency
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Shakespeares in the Ghetto
“In one of Shakespeares in the Ghetto’s early poems, Olorunnisola asks ‘Who would you be without the gorgeous tragedies that unmake you?’ The journey towards that answer is stunning, daring and deeply intimate. The reader will find themselves weeping, laughing, even struggling for breath as they try to keep up, but will never be bored. What a glorious and unabashed path Olorunnisola has crafted here, arriving at one necessary truth after the other.”
—Saida Agostini, author of STUNT and Let the Dead In
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In My Country, We’re All Crossdressers
“Few of Olorunnisola’s contemporaries are known for such aureate poetry. Many have cultivated an unoriginal, cult style accentuated to a popular idiom. In Crossdressers, Olorunnisola shows an arrival of language, and his introspection about the theme he explores is careful. However, he comes to recognition, once in a while, only for his prose—shortlisted for Writivism (2019) and winning the K&L prize (2020)—and not his poetry. This must be corrected. We dive into Crossdressers and may not swim in catharsis but the currents whisper it a little.”
– Carl Terver, author of For Girl at Rubicon
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