In Retrospect: An Interview with Gbenga Adesina, Guest Judge of the 2026 Hurt & Healing Prize
This month’s “In Retrospect” interview is with Gbenga Adesina, the Guest Judge of our poetry prize which is open for submissions until March 8th. In this series, we ask renowned poets to look back over their poems and collections, mapping out their poetic processes. We sought to hear about core poems and fascinations which have shaped Adesina’s body of work, from his early writing to his most recent compositions. His 2025 collection, Death Does Not End at the Sea, contains “startlingly capacious configurations of time and grief and kinship,” in the words of award-winning poet Aracelis Girmay. Here, Adesina walks us through his life in poetry thus far, from early poems questioning the future, to poems which explore “intimate histories interrupted by violence.”
Frontier Poetry: What was the first poem, published or unpublished, that you remember writing? What aspect of it do you look back at and appreciate the most?
Gbenga Adesina: “Dialing.” This is not the first poem or or even one of the earliest poems, but it belongs to a time period when I had begun to think very seriously that I would love to dedicate my life to literature. I did not know how to navigate my way forward. There was a future but I did not know how to get there. Here, a stanza from the poem:
I’m dialing the skies, fluffs of unknowing, apertures
of urns beyond reach. Maybe the stars are awake, maybe
tonight our hem will touch their wings of water.
Even when I can’t remember the words, I remember its atmosphere, its cadence. Its desperate prayer. It was a prayer against the veil of obscurity. Obscurity, not in the material sense, it was a cloud in my head.
It’s a feeling that is not uncommon with young poets, writers, and artists. You feel like the great feast of poetry or art is happening elsewhere and you are locked out of it; you feel like you have no access; that you are in a narrow place; you feel like you are outside looking in, and that your view is constrained by all kinds of barriers. You feel far away from the center of the world. But the truth for me though was that I also had protection and solitude of great friendships. I had, though I did not yet know how to name the feeling, the excitement of new work and with it glimpses of a future which appeared and disappeared. The new work was teaching me the language I needed to do it, though I didn’t know that yet. The work was revealing itself to me in spiritual installments. So this obscurity, if you could call it that, was full of intimacies.
One of the great lessons time reveals is that that feeling never truly goes away. That life is lived moving from unknowing to unknowing with brief intervals of clarity. And that terrifying as it is, it’s a form of fortune. To always be at the beginning of something, always at the shore of something. All births and rebirths are like that.
But that’s not how a young person thinks, a young person thinks what’s my future, where’s my future, I need to fly, I need to find a way.
FP:If there is a poem you could identify as either the launch point, catalyst, or axle your chapbook Painter of Water spins around, which poem would that be? What did the process of writing that poem entail?
GA: Painter of Water happened organically. I did not know or think I was putting together a chapbook. My identity as a poet was very private, I thought of myself as a poet, but didn’t call myself that out loud. Maybe two or three friends thought likewise. That was it. There was no audience, and I didn’t think there would be an audience. I just had a private artistic and moral concern which was: how do you write about a violence which at the time seemed so marginal, so removed from mainstream attention? I knew from an intuition sharpened by history that violence has its own brutal intelligence and would not stay confined to whatever enclosures you have designed for it. It will leap over walls and borders and whatever strictures of permission, and keep coming closer. Of course, this clarity of speaking about the project is retrospective. I couldn’t yet articulate it like this, but the feeling was inside me and I followed it, putting one foot in front of the other, trying to respond to things called forth to me. I had not read Carolyn Forche then and had never thought of the concept of “Poetry of Witness” but I see now that that was my project. I remember the first poem I wrote that made me feel like I was capturing the essence of the project. It was called, “Young Soldiers.” Later on, I wrote a poem called “How Memory Unmakes Us.” It was a major breakthrough for me then, because I had been looking for a way to not center violence, but to enact intimate histories interrupted by violence. I wanted violence to not be the norm, but an usurper. Even now that’s still my project. In that poem, I began with the scene of a hostel room in a high school in which the young boys were peacefully asleep, in different states of dream and grace. They were simply existing. And then…
FP: What lesson(s) did writing and publishing Painter of Water teach you which you applied to your most recent collection?
GA: There was almost a decade between my chapbook and the latest book. The chapbook happened organically. A lot of architecting and sculpting went into the last project. I think a lesson for a future project might be to sort of let the individual poems arrive chronologically and sit beside one another, and maybe dance with one another, and let the book come into existence through accretion.
FP: In terms of the evolution of your manuscript for Death Does Not End at the Sea, could you briefly map out the stages it went through, from a starting point to the final draft?
GA: It took a long time and had multiple lifetimes. There was a project called “Holy Bodies” which came from the chapbook and was good to publish, but which I scrapped. There was “Resident Alien” and “Alien in Residence” in which I began to assemble a new vision. What I had in mind was the vision of a chorus as in an epic, an African chorus. I was thinking of an orchestra of the living, the dead, and the unborn. I wanted to write these poems in which ghosts were citizens too. Some earlier versions had so much of the dead, but so few of the living. Another version had so much of the living, but the unborn were crying out. A chorus is not one in which the individual voice is absent, it’s the friction between the individual voice and the collective symphony, the oscillation between both, the call and response. That was where I was always headed.
FP: What running themes or fascinations do you identify throughout your poetry, from your earliest poems to your most recent ones?
GA: History.
FP: Finally, as you are writing currently (or simply thinking, which is where writing often starts), what is something—an idea, social issue, piece of art, song, etc.—that you are obsessed with?
GA: I suspect I’m not done with my ghosts, or perhaps they are not done with me.
