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Today's poem is "On Cue"
from Tender Headed

Akashic Books

Olatunde Osinaike, originally from the West Side of Chicago, is a Nigerian-American poet, essayist, and software developer. He is the author of Tender Headed, winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series as selected by Camille Rankine. His collection was also runner-up for the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for the Alice James Award and CAAPP Book Prize. Other honors include winner of the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, semifinalist for the Discovery Poetry Prize, and honorable mention for the Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Award in Poetry. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Literary Hub, Poetry Daily, Best New Poets, 20.35 Africa, New Poetry from the Midwest, Obsidian, Wildness, and elsewhere.

Other poems on the web by Olatunde Osinaike:
Two poems
"Untitled Medley"
"How to Trash Talk"
"Twelve"
"there is a flower shop next door to the church"
Two poems

Olatunde Osinaike's Website.

Olatunde Osinaike on Twitter.

About Tender Headed:

"In Tender Headed, Olatunde Osinaike asks the question, what makes a man, and what makes a man like me? As he interrogates the inner and outer workings of masculinity in all its sharp and tender parts, and the way a Black man meets the world, his poems strut and duck and weave across their pages. These poems unpack the ingredients of being and make a meal of language. They relish every word, every sound, every syllable. Their music is the sugar that makes us take our medicine, but their beauty refuses to be disguise. They disturb the peace while asking, 'whose peace?' The poems are playful, not playing. They pulse and spin and push us forward, never carry us away. Even as we dance along, we never close our eyes. This work is nimble. A two-step on a tightwire. Tender Headed grooves and shines, holds us wide awake and mesmerized."
—Camille Rankine

"What sets Tender Headed apart from most of what passes for socially engaged 'poetry' nowadays is that Osinaike is not relying on The Project to do the heavy lifting. Rather, he is writing actual poems. Inventive, musical, and surprising poems."
—John Murillo

"With precise linguistic cleverness, Osinaike shapes, mangles, and unearths gospels to smoothen the serrated edges of masculinity. What's cultivated in this resistance is space for our breathing, space for our being. Tender Headed annihilates the lie of a singular Black male identity."
—Courtney Faye Taylor

"This poet has a truly remarkable ear and a refreshing sense of assuredness in the range of his voice . . . He understands that poems are social occasions; that they find new life once given over to the air. And there is air everywhere in this boundless book: in breath, in ascension, in song."
—Joshua Bennett



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