Olatunde Osinaike’s Speech Therapy is a unique reading experience. Full of imagination, wonder, and precision, his is a world that requires reframing, reclaiming, and stark appreciation. The poems in Speech Therapy reconcile with that which require new reckonings: toxic masculinity, systemic violence, the constant backgrounding of black women. Osinaike’s ability to supplant these childhood memories with revelatory insights demonstrates the power of forgiveness, acceptance, and the existential uncertainties that claim us more often than they don’t. In Speech Therapy, Osinaike is generous, heartfelt, and brilliantly poised.

Being Human Takes a lot of Nerve

One might say it is not all wrong, these conventions 

we have made from scratch. Expecting sympathy 

in every way we do not permit it. Habitual head-starts 

that are so suitable for us we never mind the cocked gun. 

Whenever we speak of sobriety, it begins with some sort 

of fasting. Some arcane rehab we are. All my best friends are 

either aspiring therapists or people-watchers. Somehow we 

always end up tinkering with what sternness we can discover 

within the bottles emptied of our most elusive moments. 

My friends often tell me I don’t enunciate my words well enough 

and I smile every time. They ask me how I lost all that weight 

that one summer and I grow stiff as the braces I never knew 

I wanted. That was long before, even, when I invited my girlfriend 

to the landscape of my childhood and she pointed out the year 

in which I stopped smiling with my teeth. Perhaps, I still want 

for things that won’t last. Like bubble wrap and a whole 

family dinner. Yes, a whole. As in one full and poignant 

intercession. As in the slang — a measurement I have been taught 

by my sibling just this month. How is it that we are still 

creating new ways to say I am here and I am looking forward, too. 

I can’t help but think of all the times I have found myself 

in a hopeless place and left the door unlocked.

Bio

Originally from the West Side of Chicago, Olatunde Osinaike is a Nigerian-American poet and software developer. He is the author of the chapbooks Speech Therapy, a winner in the Atlas Review’s 2019 Chapbook Series (forthcoming), and The New Knew (Thirty West). A Best of the Net, Bettering American Poetry, and Pushcart Prize nominee, his work has been selected as winner of the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, a winner of the Frontier Industry Prize, honorable mention for the Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Award in Poetry, and as a finalist for the Southeast Review Gearhart Poetry Prize and RHINO Poetry Editor's Prize. His most recent work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in publications such as Prelude, Puerto del Sol, Winter Tangerine, Cosmonauts Avenue, and the Columbia Poetry Review, as well as in the anthologies Best New Poets, 20.35 Africa, and New Poetry from the Midwest. He has served on poetry staff at The Adroit Journal.

He received his B.S. in Engineering from Vanderbilt University and is a M.S. candidate in Information Systems at Johns Hopkins University, concentrating in Human-Computer Interaction.