What happens when children witness injustices that wrench innocence from their young souls?
This is what I pondered during my conversation with Adedayo Agarau in the latest episode of the podcast. Adedayo Agarau is the author of The Years of Blood, a poetry collection that explores trauma, memory, anxiety, and immigration.
Listen as we discuss the lack of emergency on ritual killings and abductions that inspired him to take on this subject, his struggles with mental health, and the ways community and religion impacted his ability to deal with his struggles.
Show highlights
- Taking on the subject of trauma
- The challenge of explaining anxiety and depression in the diaspora
- The questioning of God (the story of Taofiq) and predestination
- The beauty of language in the collection
“We were in love with the same girl. And it felt like I won when he left”
Adedayo Agarau
The Years of Blood is available for purchase now, and you can buy it here.
Got any thoughts on this episode or want to suggest authors you’d like to see on the show? Send me a note here.
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About Adedayo Agarau
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).
About The Years of Blood
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.
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.
Guest’s links
Buy The Years of Blood: https://fordhampress.com/the-years-of-blood-pb-9781531511616.html
Follow Adedayo on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adedayoagarau
Host’s links
Book a one-on-one with Lola: https://wordcaps.com/coaching/
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