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In Gorgeous Display
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2023
About this book
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.
•Debut collection from queer Nigerian poet, Ugochukwu Damian Okpara.
Author / Editor information
Contributor: Ugochukwu Damian Okpara
Ugochukwu Damian Okpara is a Nigerian writer and poet. He is an alumnus of the SprinNG Fellowship and Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus Trust Creative Writing Workshop. His works appear or are forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Poetry Wales, The Masters Review, Lolwe, The Republic, 14 Poems, Ruminate, The Penn Review, Salamander, and elsewhere. He is the author of the poetry chapbook, I Know the Origin of My Tremor (Sundress Publications, 2021).
Reviews
A quieter but equally fierce rebellion takes shape in Okpara's deeply affecting debut.
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This heartbreaking collection is full of the complex and contradictory realities of queer life.
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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
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This haunting collection charts a lyrical path toward queer selfhood.
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Frontmatter
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Contents
vii -
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Beautiful Boy with Garlands around His Waist
1 -
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What Is Left of Us Is Made Broken and Shy
2 -
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In Which I Sit with My Father on a Threshold
3 -
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We Are No Longer at the Threshold
4 -
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In Which I Sit with My Mother
6 -
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Portrait of a Boy in Gorgeous Display
7 -
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We Recognize This Space and All the Promises It Never Held
8 -
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Nervous Wound
10 -
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Just in Case I Don’t Come Home Tonight
11 -
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Logan Theatre
12 -
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Hand
13 -
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To the Manual Parts of My Upper Limbs Distal to My Wrists
14 -
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I Prefer the Safety of These Hands
15 -
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If I Die, What Would My Family Write as My Biography?
16 -
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Portrait of a Boy with Hands Helpless
18 -
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Boy Meets Boy & This Isn’t about Love
19 -
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What I Know about Beauty
21 -
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Duplex
23 -
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Orbit
24 -
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The Face of Memory Glitters with Hope
25 -
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Notes on Desire
26 -
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Host
28 -
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Diary Entry
29 -
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Leaving Sad Things Behind
31 -
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What Escape These Hands Can Tell
33 -
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That Night
34 -
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Self-Portrait as White Spaces
35 -
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In the History of Belonging
36 -
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All My Friends Are Terrible Photographers
37 -
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At a Queer Safe Space in Lagos
38 -
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The Emptiness Born Out of Escape
39 -
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Biafra War Song
41 -
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Ars Exsilii
42 -
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Peace Lilies
44 -
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At the Airport Terminal
45 -
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Joy for Yet Another Night
46 -
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Exile Leaves You at the Foot of Desire
47 -
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A Ritual about Home We’ve Come to Know
48 -
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Survival
49 -
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I Practice to Get Hold of Myself
51 -
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I Have Been Thinking about Worship
52 -
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Prodigal Son
54 -
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A Ruined Candle Wax Still Breathes Itself into Shape
55 -
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Acknowledgments
57 -
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About the Author
58
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
November 15, 2023
eBook ISBN:
9781531504625
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9781531504625
Keywords for this book
Effeminate; Exile; Family; Fear; Home; Hope; Hostile environment; Lynching; Queer; Queer violence; Rejection
