Painter of Water
Akashic Books
Cover art by Victor Ehikhamenor
Gbenga Adesina’s poems invite readers into the heat of postcolonial discord, test the warm wind of commotions to come. Painter of Water is a beautifully sequenced chapbook that stands in the “mine at noon,” and describes the rage that suffocates citizens, leaves them beyond dystopia, in bewilderment. In “Three-fifth of the World’s Songs” and other poems, citizens, primarily women, lament their swallowed songs. Adesina presents a poignant definition of loss and the lost, while offering a possibility for respite: relief through a returned lyric, the freedom to breathe songs of generation and not grief.
Ladan Osman, from the prefaceExcerpt
Gbenga Adesina, from “How to Love”This is how you love in war:
You put a bit of yourself in salt and water and
feed it to him. You make his hands write a map
that softens the night on your cheeks and then you
open a tiny follicle in his eyes and say Shabash, Shabash
Shabash.