Death Does Not End at the Sea

Winner of the 2024 Book Prize in Poetry

by Gbenga Adesina

The winner of the 2024 Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry is Gbenga Adesina for his manuscript Death Does Not End at the Sea, chosen by guest judges Hilda Raz and Joseph Millar with Kwame Dawes, Glenna Luschei Editor-in-Chief of Prairie Schooner. Adesina will receive a $3,000 award and publication by the University of Nebraska Press.

Joseph Millar praised Adesina’s poetry, writing, “This extraordinary collection, permeated with myth and with music, follows the deep filial attachment between father and son—the longing of the speaker for his deceased father and the bond he feels for his own young son. From the early poem, ‘I Carried My Father Across the Sea,’ to the imagined plight of contemporary migrants lost at sea in the title poem, it’s hard not to imagine the ghost-themes of death during the Middle Passage permeating the narrative.”

About the Book

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.

Praise

“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 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

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.