Autorentext

ADEDAYO AGARAU is a Wallace Stegner Fellow '25, a Cave Canem Fellow and a 2024 Ruth Lilly-Rosenberg Fellowship finalist. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Agbowó Magazine: A Journal of African Literature and Art and a Poetry Reviews Editor for The Rumpus. He is the author of the chapbooks Origin of Name (African Poetry Book Fund, 2020) and The Arrival of Rain (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2020). For more information, visit www.adedayoagarau.com.

Klappentext

Winner of the 2023-24 Poetic Justice Institute Editors Prize for a BIPOC Writer

ISELE MAGAZINE EDITOR'S CHOICE: 25 MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2025
THE MODACULTURE 10 ANTICIPATED AFRICAN BOOKS OF 2025
OPEN COUNTRY MAGAZINE ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2025

In this unflinching debut collection, Adedayo Agarau confronts the harrowing reality of ritual killings and child abductions that have terrorized Nigeria from the turbulent pre-democratic era to the present day. Set against the backdrop of rural Ibadan, The Years of Blood plunges readers into the depths of collective trauma where "memory forsakes the body at the point where fear fills the body like air."

These poems bear witness to unspeakable atrocities through dreamlike landscapes and surreal imagery that resist rational explanation. Memory is as vital as it is ungraspable. As the painful poem "the abduction" puts it, "memory forsakes the body at the point where fear fills the body like air." Or, in "Lilac," where "the debris of memory / becomes the fog before you." Agarau's lyrical language - at once rich and broken - captures both the violence witnessed and the guilt of survival through repetitions of words, phrases, and motifs.

As both survivor and émigré to the U.S., Agarau explores "the weight of disappearance [that] hangs heavy over memory," the ongoing trauma that cannot be shed, and the search for healing across continents. His poems attempt to wrest language out of terror's domain, asking: "How many ways can the poet craft an elegy?"

Above and beyond its art, The Years of Blood is essential reading for those interested in African literature, postcolonial studies, and the intersection of personal and political history and global literature. In its unyielding approach to its subject matter, this volume is a crucial interlocutor to conversations on trauma, grief, loss, absence, migration, loneliness, and African spiritualism.

For readers of Ilya Kaminsky, Safia Elhillo, Ocean Vuong, and Claudia Rankine, this collection speaks to both specific cultural realities and universal human experiences through poetry that refuses easy consolation.

Inhalt

Wind 1

i
Ìbàdàn 5
Sọ́kà 7
We daydreamed of angels 9
Unfound 10
In which the morning after, a boy’s body had been dismembered 11
Empty 12
Ghost of a Dead Boy Writes from Sọ́kà 13
hoax 15
Salt water 17
Bámis· é 18
Night, prayer 20
Portent 22

ii
Boys who never die 25
Entrance 28
Sonnet with Blood Everywhere 30
Fine boy writes a poem about anxiety 31
Doomsday 39
Arrival 41
Sonnet with severed limbs 45
Springfield 46
the abduction 48
It begins with gratitude & ends in rage 49
Baba omo 51
Two Boys, Their Mother & the Face 52
Disappearance 54

iii
Before the dark 57
Ruin 58
Wishbone 59
The Dark 61
The fig 63
In which the horse saddles 64
In the dark 66
Pariboto riboto 67
Lilac 68
On joy 71
Brown 72
Migration 74

iv
Prelude, Christmas 79
Ileya 80
Waiting for Her Son 81
These days of varnishing 82
Year of blood 85
Litany in which my father returns home safely at night 86

Glossary 89
Acknowledgments 95