Book launch for Adeyado Agarau feat. Sarah Ghazal Ali & Erin Sharkey

Join Milkweed Books as we present Adedayo Agarau’s book launch for his collection, The Years of Blood. Adedayo will read from the book and be joined in conversation with gracious local poets Sarah Ali Ghazal and Erin Sharkey.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Winner of the 2023-24 Poetic Justice Institute Editors Prize for a BIPOC Writer

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.

ABOUT THE WRITERS

ADEDAYO AGARAU 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 and The Arrival of Rain. For more information, visit http://www.adedayoagarau.com/.

SARAH GHAZAL ALI is the author of Theophanies (Alice James Books, 2024), winner of the GLCA New Writers Award and a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and Minnesota Book Award.​​ Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. A Stadler and Kundiman Fellow, Sarah is the poetry editor for West Branch and an Assistant Professor of English at Macalester College.

ERIN SHARKEY is a writer, arts and abolition organizer, cultural worker, and film producer based in Minneapolis. She is the cofounder, with Junauda Petrus, of an experimental arts collective called Free Black Dirt and is the producer of film projects including Sweetness of Wild, an episodic web film project, and Small Business Revolution (Hulu), which explored challenges and opportunities for Black-owned businesses in the Twin Cities in the summer of 2021. Sharkey has received fellowships and residencies from the Loft Mentor Series, VONA/Voices, the Givens Foundation, Coffee House Press, the Bell Museum of Natural History, and the Jerome Foundation. In 2021, Sharkey was awarded the Black Seed Fellowship from Black Visions and the Headwaters Foundation. She has an MFA in creative writing from Hamline University and teaches with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.