In Gorgeous Display

By Ugochukwu Damian Okpara

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Sep 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781531504618

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).

Book preview

Beautiful Boy with Garlands around His Waist

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 / the government / the shitty country / old times / & every evening / i look out for that man / i imagine a son & a father bonding over dinner / but what is left of life / if not language / memories as pretty as garlands around the head / i remember his face in a photograph / his arms open / with me blooming like a flower inside / it is the only time i remember it open / in another race / i am handing a baton to god / & his own hands are closed / beautiful boy / with garlands around his waist / sitting by the fire / back home / only wants to be seen / like the fireflies around him / i reach for this softness / & begin to break it like communion / i am making new mouths / all over my body / & i still fail at one thing / to be held close like a wound onto a lightbulb / & called kin

What Is Left of Us Is Made Broken and Shy

on the eve of my thirtieth birthday // we returned almost to each other

like the day we first met // it wasn’t perfect // but it was close

you asked for my hands // & like a good child // i offered

them to you // you held them so tenderly // like you first held me

our knees grazing the center rug // i got you last