Strange Beach
Poems
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A debut poetry collection wrangling the various selves we hold and perform—across oceans and within relationships—told through a queer, Nigerian-American lens
At times surreal, at times philosophical, the poems of Strange Beach demarcate a fiercely interior voice inside of queer Black masculinity. Oluwaseun’s speakers—usually, but not specified, as two men—move between watery landscapes, snowy terrains, and domestic conflicts. Each poem proceeds by way of music and melody, allowing themes of masculinity, sex, parental relations, death, and love to conspire within a voice that prioritizes intimate address.
In announcing their acquisition of the UK edition, after a three-way auction, Strange Beach was described as “a wrangling of the various selves we hold and perform – across oceans and within relationships – through a highly patterned and textual lyrical play: it is a deeply moving and philosophical tapestry.”
Strange Beach often eschews meaning, preferring, in its deluge of images and emotions, to transmute messages straight to the mind to the reader. Oluwaseun’s poetic influences are clear: Claudia Rankine, Jorie Graham, Louise Gluck, Carl Phillips, Kevin Young, Hannah Sullivan, John Ashberry, and Ocean Vuong. Strange Beach is a searching collection where land and water, body and mind, image and abstraction, are in productive tension, leading to third ways of considering intimacy, selfhood, and desire.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The powerful, contemplative debut from Olayiwola takes readers on a provocative journey through landscapes of queer desire. The feeling of being submerged haunts these poems that explore intimacy, the weight of familial expectations, and Black masculinity as both performance and personal truth. Images move as fluidly as perspective, as in the line "spit of him landing atop your eyelid, that puddled need." A poem set in a barber shop among men speaking of "sports, women, women as sports" prompts the speaker to self-consciously reflect on the hold a disapproving parent still has over him: "My mother's voice in my head: Don't/ embarrass me. Don't/ embarrass God.// Such power. To throw God into doubt." The speaker's melancholy feeling that he cannot fully be himself among family extends to thoughtful, at times mournful poems about the difficulty, or impossibility, of satisfying desire. A poem set in a nightclub captures this sense of ambivalence: "Sweat: drips of soul leeched through the skin to prove simply,/ at times, there's a soul at all/ to be lost. I lose myself/ in the dancing, I lose. I win." This alluring collection charts an intimate and moving encounter with Black identity.
