A note from Gboyega Odubanjo’s family at the end of Adam, his posthumously published collection, testifies to the loving efforts of communities – family, friends, editors and other writers – in ensuring that the work could be completed according to Odubanjo’s vision for it. And Adam is a book about communities. Odubanjo examines the disappearance of a child, drawing out both the mythic and biblical resonances of such an event, along with the real-world ramifications for our society as a whole, and black communities in particular. Ultimately, Odubanjo asks how people – especially children – can fall so far out of sight, and how (or whether) such losses can be meaningfully overcome.

The title refers to the still-unidentified black boy whose torso was found in the Thames, near Tower Bridge, on 21 September 2001. In the absence of information about his real name, the boy became known as Adam. Odubanjo’s work is a project of ‘remembering the boy/who was named adam/piece by actual piece re/membering him’. His writing is both muscular and limber, exhibiting an apparently depthless capacity for grief, love, warmth, humour, disbelief, curiosity and care. ‘The Lyric Adam’, for instance, briefly pastiches the academic language used to talk about poetry (‘most commonly understood as the objective form of adam’) before letting that language splinter into multitudinous forms: ‘or – more simply – the speaking voice prompting the reader/witness/man who first sees the body in the thames to imagine adam – to try to go beyond the page/thames and understand who adam is’. Standard academic language cannot accommodate the webs of connection here, where the ‘reader’ is also a ‘witness’, too close for comfort to the man who initially sighted Adam’s body. The Thames bleeds into the page, binding readers, witnesses and citizens together into a common subjecthood.

James Womack’s Why Are You Shouting? opens with a city, which, much like Odubanjo’s London, ‘drags the sea close into its formal harbours and casual inlets’; there is a river coursing through it, the tides forming ‘an odd kind of embrace followed soon after by predictable rejection’. Each stanza of