Full Description
Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry, 'Gbenga Adeoba's collection Exodus focuses on forms of migration due to the slave trade, war, natural disasters, and economic opportunities.
Using the sea as a source of language and metaphor, Adeoba explores themes of memory, transition, and the intersections between the historic and the imagined. With great tenderness and power his poetry of empathy searches for meaning in sharply constructed images, creating scenes of making and unmaking while he investigates experiences of exile and displacement across time and place.
Contents
Foreword, by Kwame Dawes
Acknowledgments
I
Resurrection
Seafarers
Nightshift at the Coast
All the Little Lights Going Out
Child of the World
Thresholds
Half Acre of Water
Exodus
Leaving Agadez
Chorography
A Funeral Hymn in Falsetto
What Birds Sing of in Libya
Middle Passage
Eclipse
Pa Cudjo Lewis Weaves a Song
Desert Fathers
A Short Essay on Drowning
II
Noah
Here Is Water
20, Gbogi Street
Rain Choral
Numbers
The Morning After
Gunfire
War Notes
Epitaphs
Nightfall, Aleppo
Kites
Promenade
Notes
