Mona Arshi & Oluwaseun Olayiwola

Quick before the story ebbs away

There are things I need to tell you

A work of great strength and equal delicacy, Mona Arshi’s Mouth transports us to a world where violence hangs in the air, where beauty, pity and cruelty intertwine. The sequence at its heart, Palace, takes the overlooked women from the edges of Greek tragedy and places them centre stage, to tell unforgettable stories of survival and loss. With new depth and force, their voices set off echoes with women navigating the terrible reality and aftermath of war today. Mouth is a complex and original study of speaking’s limitations, chasms in communication, but also the unexpected power of silence: ‘sometimes / language picks us clean’.

Strange Beach by Oluwaseun Olayiwola ventures across the same ‘Atlantic Ocean’ as Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, which is the same ‘Atlantic Ocean’ in Lowell’s Life Studies, to reveal a queer consciousness deeply steeped in poetic traditions of nuanced confession and moving abstraction. Strange Beach is geological in its accumulation of images, emotions and landscapes that stack, revolve and eschew. The resulting work transmutes messages to the mind of the reader with a feeling of cosmic intuitiveness, as emotion and intellect grapple and become forged. ‘No one can follow you here / not having to become something else’, observes one speaker, in this collection that reimagines how we love, grow, travel, and most of all, change.

This event is presented in association with Poetry Ireland