In Gorgeous Display - by Ugochukwu Damian Okpara (Paperback)

About the Book

"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.

Book Synopsis

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 collec-tion 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 relation-ships, 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, illuminat-ing 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.

Review Quotes

A quieter but equally fierce rebellion takes shape in Okpara's deeply affecting debut.-- "Boston Globe"

This haunting collection charts a lyrical path toward queer selfhood.-- "Publishers Weekly"

This heartbreaking collection is full of the complex and contradictory realities of queer life.-- "Book Riot, Must-Have New Poetry for Fall 2023"

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

About the Author

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).