Overview

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.

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Adeoba's capacity for empathy is managed by a resistance to the polemical. He understands the quite necessary art of the poet in search of meaning, which is to enter, as much as possible, into the imagined spaces. [In 'Nightshift at the Coast'] he engages the Italian coastguard who discovers the body of a Nigerian boy caught in the 'shroud of surf' on the coast. Adeoba then reiterates the point of empathy and urgency, the shared human sense of loss, and the overwhelming weight of history. -Kwame Dawes, director of the African Poetry Book Fund and a chancellor for the Academy of American Poets -- Kwame Dawes

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

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 -- Alicia Ostriker

Author Information

‘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.  

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