As America hurtles toward its 250th anniversary, MANIFEST DESTINY arrives not as commemoration, but as a profound ritual of reckoning—a meticulously constructed work of moral, structural, and cultural vision. This is not a poetry collection—some overly intellectualized cryptic work needing advanced doctoral degree in literary studies to understand. It is a threshold experience, demanding a new form of engagement from its readers. A deep but accessible work created for the cashier in Albany, the school teacher in Memphis, the firefighter in Atlanta.

In this fiercely anticipated second body of work, American-Nigerian writer Pelumi Olatinpo introduces the soneta—a radically compressed form of his own design: six lines, ten words each. Inspired by the English sonnet, the musical sonata, and West African oral tradition, the soneta becomes a compression chamber where truth intensifies. It does for the lyric what jazz did for music: creates a new, hybrid form from multiple traditions.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident / All men are created equal, some more equal than others.”

Olatinpo—who arrived in the U.S. undocumented at fifteen and became a citizen twenty-two years later—brings lived authority to his examination. His voice moves through four books—First Light, Testament, The Reckoning, and The Return—from intimacy to indictment. These are not verses that drift or perform. This is a body of language built to endure the time we are in, and time we are rapidly approaching.

Code-switching between biblical cadence, Nigerian Pidgin, and constitutional echo, Olatinpo excavates the fault lines of American identity. From Tulsa to Gaza, Chicago to Lagos, he names what the nation forgets, refuses, or erases.

The book is supported by extensive endnotes, grounding every allusion in rigor: historical, literary, and political. Its structure is liturgical. Its aim is unflinching.

“Steel noose for cotton noose.”
“In Lagos, you damn the bled, or join the dead.”
“America, you have always been America.”

For readers of Rankine’s Citizen, NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, or Coates’ Between the World and Me—this is not the next book.

This is the threshold.

Read as ritual. Remember as reckoning.