Strange Beach

‘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 to 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 permanence, the rescuing nature of grief, and the costs of visibility for all of us. Artfully rejecting the white reader as the default or standard, the shorelines of self are reshaped by freedom, desire, and memory. Seun’s erotic and meditative work dares us to touch the ocean floor and emerge transformed, undone by our strange aliveness.’
— Sanah Ahsan, author of I cannot be good until you say it

‘An utterly transfixing debut, Olayiwola’s is a work of dazzling linguistic choreography. Strange Beach heralds a sublime new voice in poetry.’
— Peter Scalpello, author of Limbic

Oluwaseun (Seun) Olayiwola is a poet, critic, choreographer and performer based in London. His creative and critical work has been published in: the Guardian, The Poetry Review, PN Review, Oxford Poetry, the Telegraph, the TLS and elsewhere. His choreographic work has been presented at the V&A, The Place, The Central School of Ballet, and Studio Voltaire. He’s been commissioned by Royal Society of Literature, Ledbury Poetry Festival, Southwark Council, and Studio 3 Arts. Seun has an MFA in Choreography from the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, where he was a Fulbright Scholar in 2018-2019. He recently began lecturing in dance in the Kingston School of Art. Seun is a member of the inaugural Rose Choreographic School at Sadler’s Wells.