Book 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.
Praise For This Book
"In this exciting debut, the tideline of the poetic phrase is constantly shifting, is forever rebuilt and remade on the sands of language, every grain of a word held up to the light to consider its myriad refractions." -—Andrew McMillan, author of Pity"What do we mean when we read a book and feel that we trust the writer? What I mean when I say that I trust Oluwaseun Olayiwola is that the poems in Strange Beach are as sure in their storytelling as centuries-old myths. These poems explain the world to me, rebuild it in front of my eyes with polysensory images that don’t stop moving. And so I stand in the middle of Olayiwola’s violent universe—where the sun’s arms are broken, where the corpses of sunflowers litter the fields, where 'snow is a skin. Inside it, / violence…'—and watch this incredible journey of survival. This world is like an ocean, erasing Olayiwola’s name from the sand with each approach; these poems are Olayiwola’s finger, rewriting his name again and again whenever the tide recedes." —Taylor Byas, author of I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, winner of the Maya Angelou Book Award
