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One of Book Riot's Must-Have New Poetry for Fall 2023
The remarkable debut collection by a young Nigerian queer poet.
“here / i am not his image / & i envy it / i shut my eyes against what is left / the crackling softness of life / like communion / desire is a marathon / a baton waiting for your grip / here / i am not running / neither is he / i sit with a man for the first time / & we talk about war . . .”
—FROM “BEAUTIFUL BOY WITH GARLANDS AROUND HIS WAIST”
In Gorgeous Display, by Nigerian poet Ugochukwu Damian Okpara, is a volume dedicated to the memory of those lost to anti-queer violence in Nigeria and elsewhere. In this first full-length collection of his work, Okpara examines queer male identity, effeminacy, and exile, offering meditations on desire and sanctuary, freedom and estrangement. Forty-three poems pierce familial relationships, safety, fear, and anxiety portrayed through the outward sign of hand tremors, queer lynching, survival, hope, the emptiness of exile, and reclamation of the self. Embracing the ephemeral and spiritual nature of physical beauty, Okpara also reveals the scars of queer displacement, illuminating the ways that leaving home is never quite the utopia one hopes for and how often the ache of abandonment can haunt a life lived in the present.
In Ugochukwu Okpara’s In Gorgeous Display we meet a son trying to reconcile a relationship with his father, his mother, his nation, and himself. Fighting against the erasures and violences of queer bodies in his native Nigeria, the poems found here are rife with searching, with discovery, with a quiet power that does not attempt to perform for the reader but rather seeks a reconciliation that is understood across oceans and cultures. Okpara unearths the way fissures shape and break us, move us and guide us, and ultimately push us towards a kind of healing that may not yet be named. This is a wise and graceful book that sits at the intersections of inter-generational time and space and serves as a suture of past and present.---Matthew Shenoda, author of The Way of the Earth
This heartbreaking collection is full of the complex and contradictory realities of queer life.
A quieter but equally fierce rebellion takes shape in Okpara's deeply affecting debut.
Beautiful Boy with Garlands around His Waist | 1
What Is Left of Us Is Made Broken and Shy | 2
In Which I Sit with My Father on a Threshold | 3
We Are No Longer at the Threshold | 4
In Which I Sit with My Mother | 6
Portrait of a Boy in Gorgeous Display | 7
We Recognize This Space and All the Promises It Never Held | 8
Nervous Wound | 10
Just in Case I Don’t Come Home Tonight | 11
Logan Theatre | 12
Hand | 13
To the Manual Parts of my Upper Limbs Distal to My Wrists | 14
I Prefer the Safety of These Hands | 15
If I Die, What Would My Family Write as My Biography? | 16
Portrait of a Boy with Hands Helpless | 18
Boy Meets Boy & This Isn’t about Love | 19
What I Know about Beauty | 21
Duplex | 23
Orbit | 24
The Face of Memory Glitters with Hope | 25
Notes on Desire | 26
Host | 28
Diary Entry | 29
Leaving Sad Things Behind | 31
What Escape These Hands Can Tell | 33
That Night | 34
Self-Portrait as White Spaces | 35
In the History of Belonging | 36
All My Friends Are Terrible Photographers | 37
At a Queer Safe Space in Lagos | 38
The Emptiness Born Out of Escape | 39
Biafra War Song | 41
Ars Exsilii | 42
Peace Lilies | 44
At the Airport Terminal | 45
Joy for Yet Another Night | 46
Exile Leaves You at the Foot of Desire | 47
A Ritual about Home We’ve Come to Know | 48
Survival | 49
I Practice to Get Hold of Myself | 51
I Have Been Thinking about Worship | 52
Prodigal Son | 54
A Ruined Candle Wax Still Breathes Itself into Shape | 55
Acknowledgments | 57
About the Author | 58