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Concert, Education, Educational, Good For Families, Indoor / Outdoor Event, Literary & Books
In conversation with Rosemarie Dombrowski and Shawnte Orion.
ABOUT THE BOOK
A debut poetry collection wrangling the various selves we hold and perform--across oceans and within relationships--told through a queer, Nigerian-American lens
At times surreal, at times philosophical, the poems of Strange Beach demarcate a fiercely interior voice inside of queer Black masculinity. Oluwaseun's speakers--usually, but not specified, as two men--move between watery landscapes, snowy terrains, and domestic conflicts. Each poem proceeds by way of music and melody, allowing themes of masculinity, sex, parental relations, death, and love to conspire within a voice that prioritizes intimate address.
In announcing their acquisition of the UK edition, after a three-way auction, Strange Beach was described as "a wrangling of the various selves we hold and perform - across oceans and within relationships - through a highly patterned and textual lyrical play: it is a deeply moving and philosophical tapestry."
Strange Beach often eschews meaning, preferring, in its deluge of images and emotions, to transmute messages straight to the mind to the reader. Oluwaseun's poetic influences are clear: Claudia Rankine, Jorie Graham, Louise Gluck, Carl Phillips, Kevin Young, Hannah Sullivan, John Ashberry, and Ocean Vuong. Strange Beach is a searching collection where land and water, body and mind, image and abstraction, are in productive tension, leading to third ways of considering intimacy, selfhood, and desire.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
OLUWASEUN OLAYIWOLA's poems have been published and anthologized in Oxford Poetry, TATE, bath magg, 14poems, Re: creation, Queerlings, and Granta with forthcoming publications in the Poetry Review and PN Review. Most recently, he was placed second in the Ledbury Poetry Competition. His criticism has been published in Telegraph, Magma, Poetry Birmingham, and the Poetry School. His choreographic work has been commissioned by Southwark Council and he is an associate artist at Swindon Dance. Oluwaseun has an MFA in Choreography from the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, where he was a Fulbright Scholar in 2018-2019. He lives in London.
ABOUT THE MODERATORS
Rosemarie Dombrowski (RD) is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Phoenix, AZ, the founding editor of rinky dink press, the founding director of the poetic medicine nonprofit, Revisionary Arts, and a Teaching Professor at Arizona State University. RD’s literary arts programming spans more than 20 years and has birthed numerous community-facing projects. In 2023, with the support of the Office for Veteran and Military Academic Engagement at ASU, she founded ISSUED: stories of service and created Verses for Vets, a poetic medicine program for veterans. In addition to becoming a TEDx speaker in April 2022, her awards include an Arts Hero Award (2017), a Fellowship from the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics (2017), a Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets (2020), a Great 48 award from Phoenix Magazine(2020), an Arizona Humanities Speaker of the Year award (2022), and an Arizona Capital Times Leader of the Year award (2023).
Shawnte Orion is the author of Gravity & Spectacle (a collaboration with photographer Jia Oak Baker from Tolsun Books) and The Existentialist Cookbook (NYQBooks). He is an editor for rinky dink press and his poems have appeared in Threepenny Review, Barrelhouse, Sugar House Review, New York Quarterly, and on the flipside of a split 7inch vinyl record with San Francisco band Sweat Lodge.
This event is at our Phoenix location at 300 West Camelback Road, steps from the uptown Light Rail stop and directly across from the Park and Ride at Third Ave and Camelback.
Event Links
Website: https://go.evvnt.com/3040256-0