Strange Beach by Oluwaseun Olayiwola audiobook review – a debut that dances with passion

The dancer and author gives this collection clarity and warmth as he narrates poems about family, queer identity, hedonism and race

The first poetry collection from the Nigerian American dancer and poet Oluwaseun Olayiwola explores themes of race, family, queer identity, hedonism and the body. Strange Beach takes its title from Claudia Rankine’s poem Citizen: An American Lyric which describes “each body is a strange beach, and if you let in the excess emotion, you will recall the Atlantic Ocean breaking on our heads”. The shoreline is a recurring image in Strange Beach’s poems, a threshold where forces collide and the landscape is forever changing shape.

Olayiwola’s verse dances between the abstract and the philosophical, and there are instances when the narrative thread is discarded and meaning is hard to glean. Clarity comes with hearing it read out loud, however. Olayiwola’s narration brims with warmth and passion, allowing us to bask in imagery, atmosphere and the speaker’s rich interior world.

The title poem finds the physical body blown every which way “like a conch shell where the echo of emotion in extremis floods the chamber”. In Crustacean, the speaker observes a figure running their hand through water when “a little crustacean attaches itself to you fingertip … In its vibration we ourselves are seen. To love what you cannot see or to see what you cannot love? Which is your problem?” The poem concludes with flourish of childlike abandon when “at a hilltop, you knot your hands behind your back, not with a string but with a mind / The grass pelts your face as you roll down the hillside, the velocity of recklessness”.

• Available via Fitzcarraldo Editions, 1hr 13min

Further listening

The Land of Sweet Forever
Harper Lee, Penguin Audio, 4hr 15min
Ellen Burstyn and Hillary Huber narrate these posthumously published short stories and essays written by Lee in her 20s, before she published To Kill a Mockingbird. The early stories, set in New York and small-town Alabama, reveal a sharp wit and an evolving literary style.

Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York
Andrew Lownie, William Collins, 11hr 40min
A jaw-dropping joint biography of the disgraced former prince, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, chronicling their dodgy business deals, extravagant lifestyles and friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. Read by the author.