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 is the debut collection from poet and choreographer Oluwaseun Olayiwola. Intimate and erotic, ecological and philosophical, the poems in Strange Beach illuminate the body as a porous landscape across which existential dramas, filial fractures, and sexual reckonings occur.
The collection ventures across the same ‘Atlantic Ocean’ as Claudia Rankine''s ‘Citizen’, which is the same ‘Atlantic Ocean’ in Lowell''s ‘Life Studies’, to reveal a queer consciousness deeply steeped in poetic traditions of nuanced confession and moving abstraction. Strange Beach is geological in its accumulation of images, emotions and landscapes that stack, revolve and eschew. The resulting work transmutes messages to the mind of the reader with a feeling of cosmic intuitiveness, as emotion and intellect -grapple and become forged. ‘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.

‘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

‘In this exciting debut, the tideline of the poetic phrase is constantly shifting, is forever rebuilt and remade on the shifting sands of language, every grain of a word held up t0 the light to consider its myriad refractions’
— Andrew McMillan, author of Pity

‘Strange Beach glitters with a consummate porosity – to life, art, pleasure, experience, the bodies of others. Olayiwola''s brilliance as a dancer and choreographer lands, pad-footed, on the page with a devastating grace. The result is gorgeous.’
— Stephanie Sy-Quia, author of Amnion

‘It’s hard to believe Oluwaseun Olayiwola’s Strange Beach is a debut collection of poems. The poems in this gorgeous and deft book about the queer body, race, family, and coming-of-age, seem to toggle between identities, between not knowing and wanting to know, between remaining on shore and being washed over. I love how the poems immerse themselves in lush and abstract diction, then suddenly we are confronted with an aphoristic truism as unclear as it is clear, such as “Immeasurable beauty/is immeasurable precisely/until it''s gone—” or “The sky is a masculinity.” Strange Beach is intimate, capacious, present, and absent, and always consistently brilliant.’
— Victoria Chang, author of The Trees Witness Everything

‘These hypnotic poems revere the lawlessness of the queer body – where land and flesh become indiscernible, shapeshifting between immeasurable sky, erect city, and unspoilable black shine. Oluwaseun casts light on how we love – illuminating the soul’s floundering for perman