Oluwaseun Olayiwola

Strange Beach

Poems

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.