Strange Beach

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. Images move as fluidly as perspective, as in the line “spit of him landing atop your eyelid, that puddled need.” A poem set in a barber shop among men speaking of “sports, women, women as sports” prompts the speaker to self-consciously reflect on the hold a disapproving parent still has over him: “My mother’s voice in my head: Don’t/ embarrass me. Don’t/ embarrass God.// Such power. To throw God into doubt.” The speaker’s melancholy feeling that he cannot fully be himself among family extends to thoughtful, at times mournful poems about the difficulty, or impossibility, of satisfying desire. A poem set in a nightclub captures this sense of ambivalence: “Sweat: drips of soul leeched through the skin to prove simply,/ at times, there’s a soul at all/ to be lost. I lose myself/ in the dancing, I lose. I win.” This alluring collection charts an intimate and moving encounter with Black identity. (Jan.)