The Years Of Blood Poetry By Adedayo Agarau

he Years of Blood walks back through the streets of Ibadan between 1998 and the present, where children vanish between football games and evening prayers, where shrines bloom in uncompleted buildings and mothers learn to live with doors that open onto absence. This collection is a communal narrative rendered in the fractured syntax of survival, where money rituals (Oògùn owó), ritual killings, and child abductions are a National lived reality. 

These poems braid reportage and dream, Yorùbá ritual and Christian and Muslim prayer, into a haunted language of survival. In long sequences of shattered sonnets with inverted meters, Adedayo Agarau finally breaks the silence on decade-long forced disappearances, anxiety, inheritance, and faith. 

Fierce, tender, and unflinching, The Years of Blood is both an elegy for a generation and a litany of small, defiant mercies.

Adedayo Agarau is the author of “The Years of Blood,” winner of the Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize for BIPOC Writers (Fordham University Press, Fall 2025). 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).