In Gorgeous Display

UGOCHUKWU DAMIAN OKPARA

76 pages, 5 × 8

9781531504601, Paperback, $16.95 (TP), £14.99

Simultaneous electronic edition available

SEPTEMBER

Poetry | LGBTQ Studies | African Studies

General Interest

“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

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.

UGOCHUKWU DAMIAN OKPARA is the author of the poetry chapbook I Know the Origin of My Tremor. His works appear or are forthcoming in Poetry magazine, Poetry Wales, Ruminate, The Penn Review, Salamander magazine, and elsewhere. He is currently pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi.