Strange Beach
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.
Oluwaseun (Seun) Olayiwola is a poet, critic, choreographer and performer based in London. He has been published by the Guardian, The Poetry Review, PN Review, Oxford Poetry, the Telegraph, the Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. His choreographic work has been presented at the V&A, The Place, The Central School of Ballet, and Studio Voltaire. 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 lectures in dance at the Kingston School of Art, and is a member of the inaugural Rose Choreographic School at Sadler's Wells.