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.
Strange Beach
French paperback with flaps, 96 pages | Audiobook read by Oluwaseun Olayiwola
Published 30 January 2025
Strange Beach
SIMULACRUM
There wasn’t love but there was what love becomes—
(sheet-wrinkle)(skin-dune)(arm-ropes lassoing
our neck flesh with push-and-pull—, equal amounts;
the hurt convincing its shape is false, the relation:
the recorded moment (he likes to record) not true)—
Then the film buffering … the unfinished triangle
your body sculpts on top of his.
Frustration. Yes. Rejection. Oh yes.
The colon’s ring hammering, waking up (not again, not
tonight). Tight. Loose. Bloodless (for now), dragging
a palm across the brick wall—now
blood (for now) streaming from you like scripture—:
spit of him landing atop your eyelid, that puddled need.
And there is freedom, there is intention to break your back in half
and call it what-you-asked-for, what your separateness
will not allow. Rattle of wooden slats (indentations
in the linen), this body you are finally inside of
being moulded into the cushion’s canvas
by what desire has given him permittance to do tonight,
tonight only—
He is not a perfect fit and that is perfect. He will not
stay the night. He will not stay. Hard
night. Leaking night. No fine point, needled stars.
The sky is a masculinity. He starts the car.
Likes to be called daddy. Needs to be called
something, anything.
There is your obligation, your obliging. Call it
gratitude. Be
grateful. Give
thanks. Give.
ANIMAL SONG
The country lights are real upon the stampede of pigs that fuss
and bisect around an obstacle of straw.
Grass, newly cut, holds the pettitoes’ rushed
imprint, doesn’t let go, cannot fetch as the pigs
split themselves on (choice entering with a dirt
finish, odorous, rank) a scarecrow in a field.
Where he’s been sewn up, as in repaired, I can see it.
Stacked lesions in his back that with training
vertically thread a new spine, the underwritten narrative
of sun setting over the pigs’ unified face. Collectivity.
Wish. Throw. Brightness. And yet it takes a dark
to know a dark. Unquantifiable quickness.
There are those we let have sway over us.
There are those who innately have it—There. Go.
With your feet. Into the designated pen. I can follow
and be quiet. Weakening, then truly weakened.
How many steps between rest and defeat until the flame
is what it always was: a symbol
for where the slaughter ends. Red-blue pool
of drained life swirling
under, refusing purple, refusing memory’s
tainted leakage—And passing through
the body like an event. When does it become
trespass? It’s Tuesday. He is coming
over to demonstrate squirm’s meaning: to writhe inside
the self. How even the bones tangle, country light
fading the room at the same angle
we had thought it departed—
FUMBLED SONNET
Ocean—though from below
you can’t quite tell; below,
not in it. What’s the saying? It is impossible
to be on the outside
of your situation the way cure
is yoked like a blue ember
to diagnosis—Okay,
I’ll say it: the new lover
must fuck the old one
out of memory. Pressure, point
of contact, all this
they decide, though speed
is of the utmost
importance when it comes to
time’s bold effects: heaven
of the body smudged like a ghost
losing its yell because it gets one more day
as matter on earth—what would you say
differently if that thing
you thought was dead
could matter once more? Brightly,
the blade’s lustere blinds
whom it has decided
to renovate; you
know nothing about the
feeling but that your abdomen
is, after all this thinking, bleeding,
swelling with blue light—
(…)
‘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
‘The powerful, contemplative debut from Olayiwola takes readers on a provocative journey through landscapes of queer desire. The feeling of being submerged haunts these poems that explore intimacy, the weight of familial expectations, and Black masculinity as both performance and personal truth…. This alluring collection charts an intimate and moving encounter with Black identity.’
— Publisher’s Weekly, starred review
‘In line after line, Olayiwola strikes on phrases that counterbalance multiple meanings, each with its own semantic rightness and visceral tug…. Strange Beach introduces a poet of aphoristic clarity and moment-by-moment drama, whose strongest poems often end on an em-dash, as though startling themselves into silence.’
— Christopher Spaide, Literary Hub
‘Olayiwola’s poems are formally daring…. The points of climax throughout the collection are unexpectedly its softer moments, where the rich natural imagery gives way to poignant reflection or self-address…. For Olayiwola, the body is a site of self-discovery where desire is both resisted and craved.’
— Zain Rishi, Poetry Wales
‘The waves of language and imagery shift and move into evermore engrossing and engaging shapes that traverse the interior and exterior aspects of human experience through philosophical, abstract, intellectual and emotional explorations.… While we are encouraged to enter a watery realm of uncertainty, while simultaneously feeling the sand between our toes, we are never abandoned by Olayiwola who urges us to move beyond survival and consider the reintegration of the more troubling parts of ourselves. It is a challenging move towards wholeness.’
— Victoria Kennefick, Poetry Book Society Special Commendation
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.
