Death Does Not End at the Sea - Paperback

by Gbenga Adesina (Author)

Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry
Winner of the 2026 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
Finalist for the 2026 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection
Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry

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.

Author Biography

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.