Esu At The Library and Other Poems – Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún

Description

A native son meets a familiar deity in a foreign town, in books, in the faces and voices of strangers, on trains, in the histories that intersect with traumas and pleasures, in flirtations at a bank on Euston Road, in food, in contemplations of space, accents, missed connections, and police shootings in Lagos; all as part of one travel experience in the time of a global pandemic and upheaval. In Èṣù at the Library & Other Poems, Túbọ̀sún returns to his favourite tools of travelogue as a vehicle for the interrogation of memory through the limits of language.

Túbọ̀sún’s superpower is writing poems that stick in your head whether they are playful or serious. There is an astuteness to them that comes from a thoughtful observation of humans and of human nature. I recommend this collection over and over again.

Chika Unigwe (Author of The Middle Daughter)

Kọ́lá, offers his readers a worthwhile convergence of occasions. By colliding at a mythological crossroad of ideas, contentions, and feelings, the poems in this book serve as sacrificial leftovers for the living who hunger for essence. As one might expect from good poetry, this is a collection that gives words to the marginal.

Jùmọ̀kẹ́ Verissimo (Author of I Am Memory)

“He sits at the crossroads and confuses the wisest of mortals and gods. This deity represents the random, unpredictable factor in both divine and temporal affairs. Èṣù is the dialectician of reality, a cautionary spirit who teaches that reality has more facets than one.”

— Wole Ṣóyínká