Brunel Prize-winning poet Gbenga Adesina’s long-anticipated debut poetry collection is here. Titled Death Does Not End at the Sea, it has already been longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry. In 2024, the manuscript had been selected by Hilda Raz and Joseph Millar, with Kwame Dawes, as the winner of the 2024 Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. The book was released on 30 September by University of Nebraska Press.
Here’s a description:
In Gbenga Adesina’s groundbreaking 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, 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 finally, 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.
Adesina, also an 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 MFA 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, and The New York Times Magazine. In April 2022, Adesina was one of 16 writers and curators featured on the cover of Open Country Mag‘s The Next Generation special issue, alongside a feature on his seminal breakout on the scene.
The 23 poems drew pre-release praise from acclaimed poets including Terrance Hayes, Aracelis Girmay, and Matthew Shenoda.
“Death Does Not End at the Sea is more than a great first book, it’s a mature reworking of contemporary elegy,” wrote Hayes. “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.” Girmay said that it “carries us into startlingly capacious configurations of time and grief and kinship. Sublime, lucid, unforgettable. It is a gift to live to be touched by Adesina’s exquisite music.”
Shenoda called it “a requiem for kinship, familial bonds, tethered histories, and splintered branches that always remember their roots” and “a welcome song in our dawn!” For Chris Abani, “Every line quivers with a deft music. The layering of meaning, philosophy, hope, grief, rebirth, ethical questioning, and song is unsurpassed.” Adesina, he wrote, is “A major talent and an important voice.”
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