The 2024 Moon City Poetry Award

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.

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.