The Years of Blood by Adedayo Agarau

The Years of Blood

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The Years of Blood by Adedayo Agarau
  • The Years of Blood by Adedayo Agarau
The Years of Blood

Fordham University Press

The Years of Blood

by Adedayo Agarau

$19.95
$19.95
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Winner, 2026 Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize
Winner of the 2023-24 Poetic Justice Institute Editors Prize for a BIPOC Writer

NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY'S 25 BEST NEW POETRY BOOKS OF 2026 - 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 US, 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.
Book Details
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
ISBN:
9781531511616
Binding:
Paperback
Pages:
114
Authors:
Adedayo Agarau
Published Date:
2025-09-02
Language:
English
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About Adedayo Agarau

Raised in Ibadan, Nigeria, Adedayo Agarau works as a documentary photographer and holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Two chapbooks, Origin of Names (African Poetry Book Fund, 2020) and The Arrival of Rain (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2020), preceded his debut full-length collection, The Years of Blood (Fordham University Press, 2025), winner of the Poetic Justice Institute Editor's Prize for BIPOC Writers. His poem "Halloween, Iowa" won the 2024 C.P. Cavafy Poetry Prize from Poetry International, and he was a finalist for the 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Agarau is a Cave Canem Fellow and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where he edits Agbowó magazine and reviews poetry for The Rumpus.

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