Strange Beach

A debut poetry collection wrangling the various selves we hold and perform – across oceans and within relationships – told through a queer, Nigerian-American lens. Strange Beach illuminates the body as a porous landscape across which existential dramas, filial fractures and sexual reckonings occur. Moving from oceanic states to earthly concerns, from geological events to blazing affairs, these poems look to make sense of human and ecological epochs. Venturing across the same Atlantic Ocean as Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, which is the same Atlantic Ocean in Lowell’s Life Studies, Oluwaseun Olayiwola’s intimate and elemental debut reveals a queer consciousness deeply steeped in poetic traditions of nuanced confession and moving abstraction. Burning with complicated desires, shifting atmospheric conditions and gymnastical syntax, the resulting work transmutes messages to the mind of the reader with a feeling of cosmic intuitiveness, as emotion and intellect grapple and forge. ‘No one can follow you here / not having to become something else,’ observes one speaker in this collection that reimagines how we love, grow, travel, and, most of all, change.