Strange Beach by Oluwaseun Olayiwola
Poetry Book Society Special Commendation Spring 2025

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.