Death Does Not End at the Sea

by Gbenga Adesina

Gbenga Adesina’s stunning debut book of poems explores the complexity of elusive citizenship and offers the reader an immigrant’s brokenhearted prayer for a new beginning, a chorus of elegies, and a cosmic love song between the living and the dead.

Genres: Poetry

114 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2025

Reviews

[Carey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sealey Challenge 2025: 27/31

This was such a moving debut! In Death Does Not End at the Sea, Adesina writes about grief, fatherhood, and immigration with a level of honesty and vulnerability that really stood out to me. It’s rare to see this kind of emotional openness from male poets as often I feel that there’s a wall between the writer and the reader. However, Adesina breaks that down completely!

Through his poems, he reflects on how toxic masculinity becomes ingrained and passed down, exploring these patterns through his own relationships with his father and his son. This was really impactful for me and again I appreciated the emotional vulnerability of these poems. In addition to this subject, I especially liked the poems that dealt with movement. In those poems, Adesina confronts both the choice to leave and the experience of being forced to. These pieces reflect not only how migration changes how we see ourselves, but also how we understand other people and the world around us. There was a lot of nuance to these and I found it interesting that James Baldwin's journey with movement was used as the focal point to delve deeper into this theme.

When I finished this collection, I was quite emotional as it left me with a lot to think about. In all honesty, it was just such a beautiful read that has definitely stuck with me since I finished it back in August (it's October as I write this since I am perpetually behind!) It has also left me eager to read whatever Adesina writes next!

Thank you to the publisher, University of Nebraska Press, for an e-ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions shared in this review are my own!

[Lychee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Im not entirely sure how to rate poetry. I feel like reading them myself and hearing the poet read their poems aloud cannot be compared, I feel like the latter is how you have to experience poetry because then you get their emotions and their inflections. The poems were an intersection of grief and joy and identity being a Black immigrant son and father. All facets of his identity and his experience losing his dad has shaped how he wants his son to be raised, all he wants his son to experience, but Theres so much hesitancy and fear of being in danger of others even when it’s just his son showing joy.

Thank you to NetGalley and University of Nebraska Press for the e-book ARC.

[Nuha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I only wish this book was longer so we could truly see the intergenerational narratives play out. there's so much beauty and pain in this collection, so much speaking to Black men in the past and reaching toward hope in the future, yearning and striving. and then the end.

[Dree · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent collection with magnificent use of language. Poems about grief, exile, immigration, parenthood. Real places, songs, movies, and musicians are named--giving more depth with fewer words. These are not obscure people or creations, they do not require research to relate to--which makes it so much easier to fall into the poems, rather than interrupting the reading to try to understand the author's intent.

I especially loved the "In Search of James Baldwin..." poems, which all start with "I had vowed the eyes of my son would see the world", and "Citizen".

[Erica Moore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review to come.

2025 National Book Awards Poetry Longlist: 2/13

[Rhiley Jade · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and University of Nebraska Press for the E-ARC! This E-ARC was sent to me in exchange for an honest review.

An honest, open exploration of grief, fatherhood, and immigration that leaves you feeling light and heavy all at the same time.

You can tell when you read this that the author dearly loved his father who he states has passed away, and his poems regarding his death are so tender. It opens up his heart and bares it for the whole world to see. To add his own experiences with fatherhood into the collection next to his grief is heartbreaking, seeing the parallels.

The subject of immigration is brought up in several poems but it's told in a story-like manner which, sad to say, seems to be the only way a lot of people will feel the most emotional towards it. I don't know if it was the author's intention to do that.

I truly enjoyed this.

[Kayla Boss · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5✨
a beautiful, moving collection of poetry about fatherhood, about roots, about the hauntingness of grief. about the incredible James Baldwin. about the movement of bodies through force and through choice, across continents; the methods of staying alive, the way these experiences move through generations, how they live and breathe on and on

coming september 1. thank you to University of Nebraska Press for the review copy through @netgalley!

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll say a thing, and you may disagree. But the experience of a man's relationship with his father, or a man's relationship with his son, is fundamentally different from what a woman experiences with the same people.

There are lovely moments here, but I didn't find a strong connection. Not a complaint, just not my cuppa.

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

He said son: my song is a joy. But a joy with sharp knives.

And the sound he made was the secret language of a nation unto which immigrants were called. It was as though I had sliced through the ocean and arrived here, only to run into my childhood.

My loss is a loss with doors.

It opens.

We are at the edge or
middle of nowhere, a geography of melancholy,
where no hand of father or nation reach
out to claim us…

I was moved to tears often in this collection, and it surprised me, but there were so many connections to the idea of migration and being a migrant/immigrant as well as the connection of slavery. I can’t say it enough times that my grandmother was an immigrant that did not learn English well, did not work here, and did not make a community here. Her loneliness, I realize now, would have filled a million oceans. My father was about 5 when he came, and he assimilated so well it surprises so many people that I am first generation. I am the beneficiary of their move, otherwise, I am not sure where I would have been born, or the more obvious idea that I never would have been born. I am so grateful for this beautiful life. I fell into a job where I worked with refugees and migrants of every kind, and it has made my life even more beautiful, so this hatred of them is killing me.

This poet connects all the dots, and more, and has such tenderness and skill, and is a voice of so many places all at once, and what we need to try to understand. I know there is so much fear of the unknown; so many people have never met or spoken to a refugee or migrant or undocumented person. I can tell you, when you do, it is the most human thing. A human speaking to a human. And my life has been enriched by what I learn and absorb, the good and the bad.

CITIZEN
The only citizenship I have was given to me
by the Brooklyn trees. The trees of heaven,
now ghost trees; the trees of Canarsie:
little-leaf lindens, silver maples, Norway maples,
and their little ship of seeds like ships on the
Atlantic. Or their paired tinted samaras which
have wings and thus love to spiral and flutter
down to the soil in the autumn gardens where
I sometimes sit and try to listen to the labor of
aquifers underground, the groan of seeds.
…
When I sleep and dream that I’m singing
in my sister’s voice, or that I’m a bird of paradise,
high and mauve above a mountain, gliding over a
blue marina, and in that dream I have on my head
a crown of fuchsia, and on my feet the bronze
hooves of white horses, the animals of grief.
…
It is not true that I praise the dead.
I merely ask them to teach me their song.

VANISHING
I give you my rain, the verbs and clatter from which there is no returning.
I give you my siren, my hymns, my psalms.
I give you maps, the crevice from which my cities have fallen.
I give you the small country of my laughter.
I give you lights parsing through lives, the fleeting
moth of days, my hours of beseeching.
I give you my private animals.
I give you the night hours from which I wake a city of salt.

PRAISE (IJALA)
Blade of my century,
praise
the flat ennui of the palm
praise
feral indigo of my childhood
praise
the prayers of my father
who is now a fossil
praise.
I was taught the testament
and I knew the testament
praise language,
theatre of trance,
antiphonal need
praise
memory, light of memory
inside me
praise
caesura of my breath
praise

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely gorgeous. Oddly relatable even for a white woman who has not come close to enduring the tragedies detailed in this book.

[LV · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The wind wakes it, but it falls back to its slumber and decay”

[Sean Chae · Rating 5 out of 5]

shoutout prof adesina
i dont think i was smart enough to fully understand all of it but it was definetly beautifully written

[Nikki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to netgalley for an arc of this book.

A beautiful collection of poems about love, death of a loved one, grief and how one can navigate the world experiencing those things.