About

How do our ancestors inhabit the world that they have abandoned? What is the place of our family in our hearts? In this stunning debut collection, Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé reveals this interior world in which the past sings its lament in the present moment. The father is Àyàndélé’s connection to the deep past and his ancestors, who move through love and the Nigerian-Biafran war, but also through the luxuriant landscape of rivers and forests. How does one person balance the past and the present? Animals can show us the way of nature. Prayer can form a river of the soul as it chants, praises, and reveres the terrible beauty of this world.

Author

Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé, the son of a painter, is from Tede, Nigeria. His work is published in Magma, Transition Magazine, Poetry Wales, Beloit Poetry Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, and The Texas Review. He is currently a doctoral student in Creative Writing at Florida State University, where he also earned his M.F.A. in Poetry. He received his M.A. in English Literature from the University of Lagos, Nigeria.

Praise

“How do the dreams of our parents inhabit our lives? In this tender and lyrical debut collection, Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé speaks with the ghosts of his ancestors through war and exile. But it is his father who connects him to this deep past and its drums, animal spirits, winds, and trees. Many of these poems seem to be prayers to the luminous self with its multitude of voices that guide us through our world of beauty and chaos. All we can do, Àyàndélé says may be to look ahead and ride across the river.”
—Barbara Hamby, author of Burn and Holoholo

“Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé’s poems are profoundly devastating in all the right ways, language, image, the places in the world, and heart he brings so effortlessly into the light. His father’s poems are so moving and permanent. Àyàndélé’s eyes miss nothing. Family is everything, and the body carries with it the memories of a geography that will move you beyond the here and now. This book is not only a welcome debut by a fine poet whose voice sings and laments, but it is also a triumph of the human spirit.”
—Virgil Suárez, author of 90 Miles: Selected and New, The Painted Bunting’s Last Mold, and Amerikan Chernobyl

“In measured poems that are at once intimate and outward-looking, My Father Paints His Dream on My Body reminds us that the wonders of the world—and the turmoil—belong to us all. While many of the poems’ subjects are close to the speakers—mother, father, grandfather—this collection never sugarcoats. Even when commemorating loved ones, it offers honest reflection for these challenging times. My Father Paints His Dream on My Body is a necessary debut, and I mean that in every sense of the word.”
—D.M. Aderibigbe, author of 82nd Division and How the End First Showed

“Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé’s My Father Paints His Dreams on My Body, probes the emergence and growth of the poet’s imagination in the shadow of the Nigerian-Biafran War as it weaves a cosmogony in which the borders between bodies and generations are navigated in song, dream, and memory. These are poems of departure and longing, but also of reconnecting and rejoining what has been separated by violence, death, and displacement. Rich in expression and metaphor, Àyàndélé’s poems are distinctive and haunting, revealing a vision in which the body is the ultimate text, and the love between people the ultimate poem.”
—James Kimbrell, The Law of Truly Large Numbers

Publisher

Distributed for Moon City Press.