Who: Adedayo Agarau with Margaret Yapp
What: an evening celebrating his new poetry book, The Years of Blood
Where: Pulpit Rock Brewing
When: Monday, 10/27 at 7:00pm
Join Adedayo Agarau (author of The Years of Blood) and Margaret Yapp (poet and Luther grad), for a joint reading and Q&A session followed by a book signing on Monday, October 27th at 7pm at Pulpit Rock Brewing 207 College Dr, Decorah, IA. Everyone is invited to this free event sponsored by the Oneota Valley Literary Foundation, with support from Pulpit Rock Brewing and Dragonfly Books.
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.
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).
Margaret Yapp is the author of Green for Luck (EastOver Press, 2024) and the founding editor of Rampage Party Press. She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MFA in Book Arts from the Center for the Book. She lives in Iowa City.
This event is part of Dragonfly Books and the Oneota Valley Literary Foundation’s robust author event series, which brings top-notch writers of all genres to Northeast Iowa to lead in conversations about literature and writing. To learn more about this event and other events with Dragonfly Books, visit www.dragonflybooks.com.
If you find that you can't make it to the event but would still like to purchase any books from this author talk, give Dragonfly Books a call at 563-382-4275. Our staff will be glad to reserve a book, have it autographed for you, and shipped out as needed.
You may also like the following events from Oneota Valley Literary Foundation:
- Next Monday, 20th October, 07:00 pm, Art Cullen in conversation with Chris Jones | Dear Marty, We Crapped In Our Nest | Conversation, Q&A in Decorah
- Next Sunday, 26th October, 04:00 pm, Unbound: A free-form writing workshop featuring Adedayo Agarau & Margaret Yapp in Decorah
- Next month, 4th November, 07:00 pm, Jeffrey Boldt | Big Lake Troubles | Reading, Q&A, and Signing! in Decorah
Also check out other
Arts events in Decorah,
Literary Art events in Decorah,
Workshops in Decorah.
