Saltwater demands a psalm -- Funtumfunefu denkyemfunefu -- A history of my day -- Naming ceremony -- Kwasiada -- A history of my day -- Light-off -- Four-in-hand -- Kwatakye Atiko -- Burning box braids on east & 94th, tulsa, oklahoma -- Memeneda -- Zaouli -- Adinkrahene -- Stank face -- Gbese -- The function -- Barbershop philosophy -- Durag, or all the places my durag is instead of wrapped round my head -- Rite -- Duafe -- Ananse ntentan -- Wukuada -- Freetown rain -- Efiada -- Proverbs: an ode to black advice -- Good air -- Yawoada -- Mourning dance -- Bodyglyphics -- Nea onnim no sua a, ohu -- Nyame dua -- Along fajara beach, the gambia -- Ebenada -- A history of my day -- Naming ceremony -- Edwoada -- [you must think yourself so big] -- Aya -- Libation -- Adinkra -- Notes -- Acknowledgements.

In Ghana's Akan tradition, on the eighth day of life a child is named according to the day of the week on which they were born. This marks their true birth. In Kweku Abimbola's rhapsodic debut, the intimacy of this practice yields an intricately layered poetics of time and body based in Black possibility, ancestry, and joy. While odes and praise songs celebrate rituals of self- and collective-care--of durags, stank faces, and dance--Abimbola's elegies imagine alternate lives and afterlives for those slain by police, returning to naming as a means of rebirth and reconnection following the lost understanding of time and space that accompanies Black death. Saltwater Demands a Psalm creates a cosmology in search of Black eternity governed by Adinkra symbols--pictographs central to Ghanaian language and culture in their proverbial meanings--and rooted in units of time created from the rhythms of Black life.These poems groove, remix, and recenter African language and spiritual practice to rejoice in liberation's struggles and triumphs. Abimbola's poetry invokes the ecstasy and sorrow of saying the names of the departed, of seeing and being seen, of being called and calling back.