Exodus

‘Gbenga Adeoba is a graduate fellow at the University of Iowa. Born in Nigeria, he is the author of the chapbook Here Is Water, which appeared in the African Poetry Book Fund’s New-Generation African Poets Series. His work has been published in Oxford Poetry, Pleiades, Salamander, Poet Lore, African American Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.

• Foreword, by Kwame Dawes    Acknowledgments    IResurrection    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    IINoahHere Is Water    20, Gbogi Street    Rain Choral    Numbers    The Morning After    Gunfire    War Notes    Epitaphs    Nightfall, Aleppo    Kites        Promenade    Notes

“There is both passion and beauty in Adeoba’s work, framed by what seems an acute sense of the power of language to capture reality. To capture and reveal truth, shrouded in all its scars, alive somehow with hope. History demands that images of drowning surge through Adeoba’s Exodus. The Mediterranean is ‘a grave wide enough for the numbers,’ we too ‘could become a band of unnamed migrants / found floating on the face of the sea,’ and ‘you could find trinket boxes or a girl’s / plastic doll in that rubble. . . . / The tiny things are heavier.’ Yet the poet can still imagine shorebirds’ songs ‘urging men to love again, calling / them to images craving tenderness.’ For poetry too is a tiny thing, and a heavy one.”-Alicia Ostriker, New York state poet laureate and author of Waiting for the Light