Death Does not End at the Sea: (The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry)

Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry

In Gbenga Adesina’s debut book of poems, a defiant and wise exploration of exile, voyages, and spiritual odysseys, we encounter figures embarking on journeys haunted by history-a son keeps dreaming he carried his dead father across the sea; a young Black father, tired of fear and breathlessness in America, travels with his son in search of the ghost of James Baldwin-to Paris, the south of France, Turkey, and Senegal to investigate his ancestral roots; and a group of immigrants on small boats in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea sing in order not to drown, in a stunning sequence that invokes the middle passage.

In a lyrical voice at once new and surprisingly ancient, Adesina’s Death Does Not End at the Sea explores the complexity of elusive citizenship, an immigrant’s brokenhearted prayer for a new beginning, a chorus of elegies, and a cosmic love song between the living and the dead.
 

Table of Contents:
Glory

I

I Carried My Father Across The Sea
The People's History of 1998
The Wedding
Surrender
In Search of James Baldwin in Paris (I-IV)
Brief History
The Lovers of Modena
Coma: A Sequence
Envoy to the South of France

II

Death Does Not End at The Sea: A Sequence

III

In Search of James Baldwin in Istanbul (I-III)
All of the Lights
Citizen
116th Street
Paradise
Man Radiating Happiness
In Search of James Baldwin in Senegal (I-II)
Vows
Vanishing
Praise
GorÉe
Envoy to the South of France
Elegy of Hands

Acknowledgments

About the Author :
Gbenga Adesina, a Nigerian poet and essayist, is the inaugural Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic Poetry at the Furious Flower Poetry Center, James Madison University. He received his Masters in Fine Arts from New York University, where he was mentored by Yusef Komunyakaa. He is the cofounder and editor of A Long House, a journal of diasporic art, thought, and literature. He has won multiple fellowships, and his poems have appeared in the Paris Review, Harvard Review, Guernica, Narrative, Yale Review, The Best American Poetry, the New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere.
 

Review :
“Death Does Not End at the Sea is more than a great first book, it’s a mature reworking of contemporary elegy. Gbenga Adesina reconfigures the loss/ghost of his father into odes celebrating vulnerability and personality-as well as Fela Kuti in Versace and a globetrotting James Baldwin. The tender, scrutinizing spirit of Baldwin guides these beautiful meditations on the nature of love and grief. Death Does Not End at the Sea is more than a debut, it’s a revelation.”-Terrance A. Hayes author of Lighthead, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry “Gbenga Adesina’s Death Does Not End at the Sea is a requiem for kinship, familial bonds, tethered histories, and splintered branches that always remember their roots. Adesina bridges memory both personal and collective with the migratory movements of global Black life. What results is a poetry in witness and celebration, a tenderness and veneration, a welcome song in our dawn!”-Matthew Shenoda, author of Tahrir Suite: Poems and The Way of the Earth “Death Does Not End at the Sea is a collection from a poet who has matured in voice and craft. Every line quivers with a deft music. The layering of meaning, philosophy, hope, grief, rebirth, ethical questioning, and song is unsurpassed. A major talent and an important voice, Gbenga Adesina has earned every victory in this book, every accolade it will earn, and every moment of luminosity, of which there are many. In this breathtaking work we encounter a poet who carries this tradition with an easy grace. Beautiful.”-Chris Abani, author of Smoking the Bible