Paperback
The 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.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.