Interview by Justin Goodman
Congratulations on The Years of Blood! It’s quite the achievement and I can imagine it’s satisfying to see it in print after winning the 2023/2024 Poetic Justice Book Prize. I wanted to start by onboarding the compulsive reader: could you give a little background to the collection? How did it come about? Did the poems arrive at once or did they drip in? How did it end up a nominee, let alone a winner? And now that it’s published, do you feel this most recent work of writing/compiling has given you any new lessons or insights into your craft, the work of poetry, or publishing?
Justin, thank you for speaking to me and for your well wishes. I have been a fan of the works spotlighted at the Compulsive Reader, and it feels like a full circle to be speaking with you.
Poetry, I believe, has a mind of its own, and The Years of Blood is perhaps the clearest example I’ve experienced of that principle in action. After I wrote the first poem, “Ibadan,” it felt as though I was certain I was ready to excavate the memories that my body had kept from me while I was in Nigeria. I wasn’t sure it would become what we have now as the collection, but I was certain I was working with a very coherent memory of a collective. To carry the weight of a country, or its silence, reminds me of the individual grief of Eric Yipp’s persona in his poem, “Depend,” which worked on the level of understanding the idea of time and the kinetics of the suffering body. The poem’s consciousness and the loop within it exist and possess their own understanding of time. It’s a sync only a poem understands. In this case, I spent two years in Iowa writing these poems that thought about home with a critical eye. I walked the mornings after the snow—my first snow—thinking about how these poems can carry the silence that we choreograph as Nigerians in the face of what I am now associating with forced disappearance, which hasn’t exactly received the clinical and critical scrutiny it deserves. How much logic or theory answers the question of what the body can offer? How weight does the spiritual currency of the body carry? What does it mean to live through these years of blood that still persist, and that we still live through as Nigerians? What is this numbness? When I received the call from Elizabeth Frost that evening around 7:00 pm, which must have been late at night in New York, I was waiting to pick up the dinner I had ordered. I remember now how numb I felt during the call and afterward, how I stammered as I muttered the thousand thank-yous. How, after, I sank into the ground, behind the red door of my apartment, weeping, that finally, a node, a piece of the silence we have lived through as a collective, will be in the world. Not sure what it meant to them, why they selected, how the editorial team arrived at that conclusion, but I imagine they shared in the consciousness that the book carried. The collection reads like a fever dream and almost speculative, but we lived through that. Still do. It is impossible to divorce the consciousness of the poetic eye, Justin. Craft consumes wholly, as Carl Philips puts it, “the way persuasion fills a body.”
Nothing better captures the variety of styles in The Years of Blood quite like the line “boys the hope of a chameleon/always changing, always changing” from “Boys Who Never Die.” The poems range from brick-like solidity to melting across lines to heavy em dashing. What struck me most was how often you switched between predominantly lower case to conventional title case. It gives the collection a restless, unsettled quality that I think works in its favor. How important was it to capture that type of energy for you?
There are poems you enter like a house. A doll house. A sand castle. An anthill. A studio full of books or people. A studio of drowning books, an idea first brought to light, to me, by Ibukun Adeeko’s A Room with a Drowning Book, which opens with: “somewhere in the room a book is drowning, the floor / is shivering with pages. You said the spine is the balance / to our two winged hearts.” I read the poem in 2015, two years after I started writing, and it has continued to occupy my subconscious understanding of what poetry, what the words can do, especially when it’s written toward an occupied space. What happens now to a room once filled with books, that are now drowning, have now drowned? The poem, “Boys Who Never Die,” is a chorus, a chant, a lyric that best describes the smallness of our lives. How one day after school, a child whose mother waited for twelve years to conceive has now been erased from public memory. In what book, that has now drowned, is the boy, the child, bellowing? Can you hear the echoes or chant, like prayer, the recursive, the divided, the unholy, the blessed, the body? I am trying, throughout the collection, to explain that I had a band of boys once, and that they were taken from me. I failed so many times writing the poems in the collection at the epistolatory but Boys Who Never Die, which takes its influence from the title of Safia Elhillo’s collection, Girls That Never Die, felt the closest to the temporalities with which the voice, the boy, the persona is exhuming, and recording, however impatient and unreliable, a collage of faces. The collection is restless, I am restless, we are restless in Nigeria—“later that night / i held an atlas in my lap / ran my fingers across the whole world / and whispered / where does it hurt? / it answered / everywhere everywhere everywhere—as Warsan Shire puts it. The collection, the poem, feels like sitting on a powder keg with an agitato pulse. The trauma in the collection, which is national and almost continental, is unsettling, and as such, the poems, as they arrived, resist formal, coherent, and ordered synergy. The Years of Blood is a collection that borrows many systems-thinking concepts from my background in content design, as well as Celan’s idea of the fractured line.
When you go back to For Boys Who Went after this collection you get the picture of a writer drifting towards an impressionist current. For Boys Who Went centers on “my body is home to me” (“Body”) such that it has a poem dedicated to the its chronology (“Timeline”). Your 2019 collaboration with Elizabeth Horan, So Righteous We Go Flying, features your photography, literally pictorial. Your 2020 chapbook The Origin of Name repeats the instruction for the reader to imagine this or that (“Abiku”) and even begins with the narrative that “your mother dreamed that a ship wrecked in her stomach” with “a long line of fathers around his neck” (“Aubade For A Child With His Umbilical Cord Tied Around His Neck”). Compare that shipwreck alone to the more diffuse one in The Years of Blood that “teach[es] death about itself, wreck[s] the ship in everyone’s grief” (“On Joy”). I know these works are some time ago, so in a very concrete sense you’re a different person, but has this movement been a conscious choice? Do you experience it as movement away/towards?
Ellen Bryant Voigt, during her visit to Stanford, last year, mentioned so casually that she moved unintentionally through a trauma she didnt realize she was working around or trying to understand in her work for years and that perhaps is the best way to think about this question. I have been writing about boys all my life, and right now, I believe boys in my work may work as metaphor for child, or a loose definition of my obsession with the forced masculinity of boy children where I came from. I think we were conditioned to be men, or were trained to be men that they laughed at us when we cried, saying “you are a man” even when we were just four or five. When I found poetry, I subconsciously moved through the understanding of the self that i had no audacity to challenge in my literal life. Poetry was where I went to to vent, to safekeep, to talk about what i couldnt share with my parents. I didn’t realize that my chapbook, For Boys Who Went, in 2016, is serving as a prelude to The Years of Blood. Coming to the fullness of self, as an adult now, is realizing we are writing toward, in the first years, the understanding of that we will come into years later. In the dedication, I say “dedicated to you,” and I am now realizing the you is myself, who would later understand the consciousness that silently overwhelmed not only my physical environment but also the spiritual and liminal. I am still asking what the body forgives, what the body forgoes, what the body remembers—which I dont think even The Years of Blood fully anwers. I think of my writing now as the space between Richard Siken’s “Crush” and “War of Foxes” and the reckoning which we are finally coming to find in “I Do Know Some Things.” The writer is always forming, progressively understanding itself—as Yiyun Li’s character, Agnes, did in The Book of Goose.
Your connection to Yoruba culture is, to say the least, a large part of your writing. You see it not just in the Yoruba in The Years of Blood itself, but in the above-mentioned The Origin of Name, published alongside eleven other poets for the New Generation African Poets chapbook anthology. In that book you write “the gods gave us tongues to call every darkness in us by its name” – the dynamic between the collection’s title and this line leads the reader directly back to the act of giving language to things, to ask “whose language” and “why language.” To quote your interview with Jamaica Baldwin at the African Poetry Book Fund regarding The Origin of Name: “I have never seen — maybe because I haven’t traveled widely — a people whose history holds the pillars of existence as closely as the Yoruba’s does.” I was hoping you could talk a bit about how you situate Yoruba-ness within your poetic work. How do you think about this in connection to your sense, as you wrote in Ex-Puritan, that a transformation is needed to “fundamentally rethink how we categorize and value different poetic traditions”?
I am writing an essay where I am thinking about the head as the god of the body which aligns with the yoruba’s hierarchy of its pillars of the godhead, or to put it more directly, the head is the governor of the body’s spiritual hierarchy—just as Olodumare presides over the pantheon of orishas, the ori presides over the body’s various spiritual and physical functions. This belief creates a microcosmic theology, an idea which borrows so heavily from yoruba cosmology and agrees with the body as universe, the head as supreme deity, other organs and systems as lesser deities or spiritual forces. My writing operates within this form of ritual. Matthew Shenoda in a 2025 workshop at Cave Canem mentioned that my work is usually working through its own ritual and I agree with that largely because I am writing, very often, about a sense of ablution, an offering or sacrifice. In The Origin of Name, which I must go back to to fully form my theology, “the gods gave us tongues to call every darkness in us by its name” suggests that language becomes the ritual tool through which the ori (head/supreme deity) exercises dominion over the body’s spiritual hierarchy. The tongue, as organ-orisha, serves the head-deity by giving form to what was previously unnamed darkness. When the head/ori names darkness, it’s asserting divine authority over chaos, bringing order to the body-universe through the sacred act of recognition and articulation. As with everything, the yoruba belief is rooted in the mathematics of binary oppositions. In Christianity, there is God and the “satan” which has been misnamed as Èsù, an idea lost in translation, is its own god of the mischief, crossroads, communication, and trickery. Èsù, is one of the gods you go to for redemption or to divert evil because it knows the name evil is called. However, this theological sophistication has also opened a doorway for those who corrupt the practice: who understand the power dynamics but willfully ignore that every human carries ori—that every person is themselves a divine cosmos. When people use humans as sacrifice, which I am documenting in The Years of Blood for personal gain, they commit theological theft that treats another person’s divine essence as commodity that ignores the recognition of their equal spiritual sovereignty, severing the ethical cord that makes the spiritual technology sacred rather than demonic, bypassing their own ori’s divine responsibility to exploit other people’s godhood as raw material for power. The very theology that empowers through integration also constrains through ethics—divine responsibility runs both ways, and authentic practice honors the complementary nature of forces while maintaining the sacred recognition that each ori governs its own body-universe.
Faith plays a complex role in the collection. On one hand, Yoruba priests attempt to ward off kidnappings with blood and “what we learned regarding ritual is that blood is thicker than blood” (“Portent”). God is preceded by the self (“I say my name before I remember God” in “Sonnet with severed limbs”) and is even reduced to a lowercase g (“Doomsday”). On the other hand, there’s a longing for real proximity to faith (“My God” being one of those things worshipped and missed in “Fine boy writes a poem about anxiety”) and a soothing effect when found — in “Year of Blood” this tension is concretized by the opening “turn away from prayer when you grow tired” and the later “words held inside incantations,” incantations having a not distant connection to ritual and faith. You’ve also said on Instagram how this collection was “born from memories both sharp and fading of childhood and coming of age in Ibadan”; in your January interview with CỌ́N-SCÌÒ Magazine you connect these memories to “the backdrop of political restructuring, linking the desire for power and money to the need for body parts and ritualism.” Where do you see faith in the process of grieving, coming of age, and poetry?
Faith—a delusion—is an interruption of the visceral. Faith is the filling of silence. Not a substitute for. We go into poems, hoping we will find new truths about ourselves—faith. I grew up in a Pentecostal church, and I witnessed numerous miracles. Our pastor, at the end of such wondrous moments, would remind us to come wanting, come needy, come hungry, and believe that you will be filled. He called that kind of hunger “faith.” In my poems, akin to ritual practices, I am often arriving at new truths about myself. In “The Years of Blood” and some of my earlier chapbooks, and in fact, my next book, faith is the time we spend waiting, whether in the poem, prayer, or even in the act of watching, as fathers kept vigils and burnt tires all night, sharing bottles of gin and telling each other stories. How could we have survived these years of blood without the delusion that the gods would keep us safe?
There’s a line Christopher Okigbo repeats in his Distances — “I was the sole witness to my homecoming” — which I felt resonated with The Years of Blood quite a bit. He’d written that this poem was of spiritual homecoming, of “the self that suffers, that experiences, ultimately finds fulfillment in a form of psychic union with the supreme spirit that is both destructive and creative.” I was struck by how The Years of Blood is itself a sort of homecoming, at least as much as reckoning with trauma and violence is a sort of homecoming. You make note in the acknowledgments about the origins of this collection along these lines, preceded by the final poem about the quotidian and yet remarkable fact of a father returning home safely. But it’s hard to miss that this collection doesn’t feature a “sole witness” pursuing “psychic union with the supreme spirit,” but shows the concreteness of violence while featuring multiple witnesses who are interlocked and isolated in equal measure. In that vein, I was hoping you might talk about your vision of being a “witness” and where you see the poet in this dynamic. I can’t help but see in the collection’s titular poem an attempt to reclaim agency by the act of bearing witness.
Very recently, I mentioned so casually that The Years of Blood is “our community book,” and although it had been said as a joke, it is true of the book. And you’ve touched on something essential about how the collection both inherits from and fundamentally rejects Okigbo’s witness paradigm. That repeated line — “I was the sole witness to my homecoming” — mirrors a kind of modernist isolation that this collection actively resists, even as it shares Okigbo’s understanding that any authentic homecoming must reckon with trauma. Where Okigbo’s speaker achieves transcendence through solitary spiritual reckoning, The Years of Blood adopts what I think of as a communal witness epistemology, also pushing against Western witness poetry traditions that position the poet as either victim-survivor or ethically anxious outsider, constantly navigating questions of authority and appropriation. Instead, it recognizes that in contexts of ongoing structural violence — what we might call Nigeria’s perpetual state of un-ease — we are all always already witnesses. In instances where the lyric or fractured I departs the scene, the poet takes the robe of a griot, the custodian of collective memory rooted in African oral traditions. We are perpetually alone in our suffering, yet we all know we are bound by this fear of forced disappearance. The western witness tradition presupposes stable distinctions between witness and survivor, observer and victim, but when trauma is generational and ongoing, and violence is quotidian and extraordinary, the tradition fails as much as it actively colonizes.
Okigbo goes on: “the process is one of sensual anesthesia, of total liberation from all the physical and emotional tension; The end result, a state of aesthetic grace.” I don’t mean to force the comparison (although there are throughlines), but it struck me that The Years of Blood, despite a structure implying movement towards “aesthetic grace” of a kind, doesn’t end with something like “total liberation.” Rather, as stated above, it’s a simple act of return, with the conclusory lines being the even simpler, anodyne act of sleep; a simplicity laced with the looming sense that it’s a temporary reprieve. Teju Cole uses the first half of a Yoruba proverb for the title of his debut novel that I think captures the tone: “every day is for the thief, but one day is for the owner.” Incomplete justice (the owner’s “one day” never arriving) strikes me as the general sensibility in The Years of Blood, one which you’d expressed in a similar way in an interview with More Branches: “everything here inspires you to begin, or end, or to stay right there in the static screeching of silence.” I think you could easily call “the static screeching of silence” sensually anesthetic. Do you see “a state of aesthetic grace” in the process of poetry though? Is there a fine line, or even a difference, between aesthetic grace and a kind of numbness?
I think Okigbo’s formulation of “aesthetic grace” has to be read in the condition of his own work, when modernist ambitions met the looming prospect of war, when he could turn toward myth and ritual as spaces of both danger and window. The weight of conflict was anticipatory, prophetic. In contrast, I am writing from a more physical present, already marked by forced disappearances, ritual killings, and the day-to-day proximity of death. A different lens to understanding the Yoruba adage is the continuous, persistent looting of this metaphoric thief, which in The Years of Blood, is the hand that takes and takes. The collection is gesturing toward the catastrophe already here.
That’s why I don’t think I write toward the kind of transcendence that Okigbo’s escape poetics offers. To do that would feel like betrayal, as if I buried the children of Ogunleye Street in the book and then turned away, saying, “This is too heavy, please leave me alone.” The poems have to stay with the weight. The poem has to remain there, with us, with every one of us, even as everyone, including the father, goes to sleep. The tension continues at daybreak.
As stated before, several of your poems lean heavily on em dashes (“Sonnet with Blood Everywhere” features twelve, opening two lines and end-stopping three). I love how this slices the cadence of the line, making it visceral visually and sonically. You mentioned the impact of music on your writing in a 2020 interview with Africa In Dialogue for The Arrival of Rain, listing everything from Remi Aluko to Hozier (featured in an ode within The Arrival of Rain). Does it still hold this place for you? How do you think about grammar (such as em dashes) as a vehicle for rhythm seeing as music’s not as bound to the page? Music recs are also welcome. I listened to Remi Aluko for research and I would absolutely recommend “Brutality” to the curious (and Hozier is a classic at this point).
Perhaps in a different conversation, I will hear what you think of Remi Aluko’s sound. But, yes, music still holds that place for me, though maybe differently than when I was writing The Arrival of Rain, when I was listening more directly. Songs could enter the poems almost intact. Percussion is where it starts for me. Growing up, I could never lead songs in the choir because I couldn’t stay on beat, so it’s always a little delightful—and honestly validating—when readers tell me they hear the metronome in my poems. The slashes and the em dashes do that work. They also help me draw on call-and-response and praise-chant lineages where breath, rest, and refrain structure performance. I write to preserve that performance logic on the page. The em dash becomes the call’s clipped hold; the line break is the crowd’s intake; the white space is the drummer’s hand lifted above the skin before the strike. For a tonal language background, punctuation also protects contour. In the backdrop, I am thinking of prosodic boundaries and my own semantic liberties.
Winding down from these dense questions—The Years of Blood is an experiment in form and an expression of personal and collective grief, struggle for agency, but it’s also specifically connected to experiences of “childhood and coming of age in Ibadan.” Given that, how’s the reception been to it in Nigeria, in Ibadan, and in your family?
This is something that will take me some time to find answers to. Books about grief and civic harm take time to find their communities, and I expect the clearest answer will come slowly, in conversations, in reading groups, among readers who share similar trauma. What I can say now is that I wrote The Years of Blood to sit inside a public memory that is persistent yet often erased. If the book does any good at all, I hope it is to keep a record of what happened and to name the conditions that made it possible.
You’ve made it a large part of your career so far to increase global consciousness of Nigeria’s vast literary tradition and to see that tradition acknowledged. Between the UnSerious Collective and your work as Editor-In-Chief at Agbowo Magazine, I’d say you’re going strong! While you’re here, is there an author, publisher, or publication you think the compulsive reader should open a new tab on their browser right now to look into? Old, new, under-appreciated, under-rated, you can take it wherever!
Justin, this is a beautiful time to discuss Nigerian writers. There is a strong slate of forthcoming poetry collections by Nigerian writers worth preordering and requesting at your library: Othuke Umukoro’s Fenestration, Gbenga Adesina’s Death Does Not End at the Sea, Jumoke Verissimo’s Circumtrauma, Hussain Ahmed’s Crossroad Mirror, D. M. Aderibigbe’s 82nd Division, Chisom Okafor’s Winged Witnesses, Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto’s The Naming, Saddiq Dzukogi’s Bakandamiya: An Elegy, and the African Poetry Book Fund chapbook box set Kumi Na Moja, which includes several Nigerians such as Abdulkareem Abdulkareem, Hauwa Saleh Abubakar, Michael Imossan, Rahma Jimoh, Roseline Mgbodichinma, Adesiyan Oluwapelumi, and Timi Sanni. Looking into next spring, keep an eye out for Michael Imossan’s All That Refuses to Die and Chiagoziem Jideofor’s local remedies.
Thank you for taking the time to talk with me about your work! I’ll leave you with one final question, and a light one: if you could have The Years of Blood translated into any language, which language would you choose and why?
Chinese. Perhaps the most poetic language after Yoruba.
Review of The Years of Blood here: https://compulsivereader.com/2025/08/21/a-review-of-the-years-of-blood-by-adedayo-agarau/
About the Interviewer: Justin D Goodman (they/them) is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY and a member of the New Haven Writers’ Group. Their work has been published, among other places, in Cleaver Magazine, Prospectus, and Prairie Schooner. You can find more of their work at JustinDGoodman.com