In the notes and attributions to Tolu Oloruntoba’s third collection – a list that includes Albert Camus and Alice Oswald, Ben Okri and John Donne, Christine Miserandino’s spoon theory (about energy allotment in people living with chronic conditions) and Little’s Law (“a key theory in operations management”) – one name stands out from the others. That name is Jacques Derrida.

The French theoretician appears a couple of times in Oloruntoba’s notes, although his spirit is all over Unravel, a postmodern, post-colonial collection that follows closely Derrida’s notion of decentring: subverting traditional linguistic or intellectual hierarchies by substituting marginalized or overlooked conditions and increasing the potential for what he referred to as the “infinite play of signification.” This is made manifest in the title of the multi-section poem “Dismantle,” which begins with the line, “I’ve been curing my confusion since birth,” an observation that is immediately subverted with a punning joke on the word “curing”: “Flesh. Salt. Smoke. / Jerk.”

Free-floating signification is endemic in these poems, including the tellingly titled “Come Si Dice?,” in which the speaker takes a tour of the ducal palace of the 15th-century lord of Urbino, Federico da Montefeltro. The speaker is, to put it mildly, less than impressed with the noted Italian humanist’s intellectual and artistic legacy, determining him to have been “all bluster” and asking “how does one say // This interpretation is not mine?” The speakers in these poems disclaim a stagnant, Eurocentric approach to art and history and knowledge, instead insisting on ideas of divergence and difference.

“I am not the word ramus,” says the speaker in “Indecision Tree,” referring to the Latin word meaning “branch.” “I am the word ramify, / expansive with consequence.” Elsewhere, consequence “is the word that splintered in my mind.” Lest one think this is simply an extension or a revision of a particular idea across verses, Oloruntoba is up to even more than that: the second quote can be attributed to the American poet Terrance Hayes. It appears in a cento (a poem created as a collage of lines from other poems and poets) that also incorporates lines from Horace, William Carlos Williams, and Ocean Vuong, among others.

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: “I’ve made my home in that motion // to transmute the outrage of the years” (lines from José Olivarez, translated by David Ruano González, and W.S. Merwin, respectively). 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. The speaker in “Mating in Captivity” assures the reader that he “will not be the first to show / the line between diaspora and dispersion.”

Like Derrida’s slippery theories of instability between signifier and signified, Oloruntoba’s own philosophically dense, linguistically charged verse can be tricky to penetrate; the poems are at their best when they are at their loosest, dealing in irony and a relatively straightforward presentation. This, for instance, from “Lagos Money”: “You may have heard / of the cashless economy, / meaning you, cashless.” Or the surprising tenderness of “Iyéwándé,” about a father’s devotion to his daughter made greater by the guilt he feels over abandoning his grandmother (whom his daughter resembles in appearance) while she was dying.

“I’d thought hatred would save me;” says one speaker. “I thought love would save me, / before I thought poetry would save me.” There is a certain strain of self-flagellation here and elsewhere in the book that feels at once poignant and a bit cloying, as though the poet’s deliberate decentring tactics have left him unmoored and disjointed. “Poetry may be that truce with my death drive,” the speaker in “F.” postulates, and perhaps this is the best that can be hoped for in a world where everything seems contingent and strange. The process of unravelling, after all, can be as precarious as it is courageous.

Correction, April 21, 2025: Thereview has been updated to reflect the correct spelling of the poem “Contronym.”