In Gorgeous Display

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).

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

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