Each One a Furnace

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, buntings, siskins, grosbeaks are all somewhere between mid-dying flight and already gone, singing like canaries in the coal mine of global capital, flaming out like comets of feather and consciousness and history.”
—Sonnet L’Abbé, author of Sonnet’s Shakespeare

“These are poems of deep thought, passionate engagement and often searing images.” 
—Toronto Star

“Each One a Furnace is an expansive, powerful collection, animated by a combination of analytical keenness, rage, and vulnerability.”
—Winnipeg Free Press


Praise for Tolu Oloruntoba:

“Oloruntoba draws on a wide frame of references, from Norse mythology to modern gaming and the work of contemporary artist Wangechi Mutu, creating a thoroughly modern and unique ecopoetics.” —Poetry Foundation