In this poetry 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.”
Adeday0 Agarau
The Years of Blood is published by Fordham University Press.
Adedayo Agarau
is the author of The Years of Blood (Fordham University Press 2025), winner of the Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize for BIPOC Writers. He is a Wallace Stegner Fellow ‘25, a Cave Canem Fellow and a 2024 Ruth Lilly-Rosenberg Fellowship... Read more
Adedayo Agarau
is the author of The Years of Blood (Fordham University Press 2025), winner of the Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize for BIPOC Writers. He 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). Read less
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