Strange Beach by Oluwaseun Olayiwola
Poetry Book Society Special Commendation Spring 2025 #Sappho 'because it was a book

'because it was a book written heart and soul

The space around objects

these hymnals

Kelly Michels has heeded Robert Lowell’s injunction to ‘say what happened’ and her report is fashioned in a series of remarkable poems

born and raised in Coventry

Strange Beach by Oluwaseun Olayiwola<br><b>Poetry Book Society Special Commendation Spring 2025</b> #Sappho 'because it was a bookStrange 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