Strange Beach

<p><em>Strange Beach</em> is the debut collection from poet and choreographer Oluwaseun Olayiwola. Intimate and erotic, ecological and philosophical, the poems in <em>Strange Beach</em> illuminate the body as a porous landscape across which existential dramas, filial fractures, and sexual reckonings occur.<br>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. <em>Strange Beach</em> 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.</p>