Selected by Amaud Jamaul Johnson for the 2023 Jake Adam York Prize, Yalie Saweda Kamara’s Besaydoo is an elegantly wrought love song to home—as place, as people, as body, and as language. A griot is a historian, a living repository of communal legacies with “a story pulsing in every blood cell.” In Besaydoo , Kamara serves as griot for the Freeborn in Oakland, the Sierra Leonean in California, the girl straddling womanhood, the woman re-discovering herself. “I am made from the obsession of detail,” she writes, setting scenes from her own multifaceted legacy in sharp relief: the memory of her mother’s singing, savory stacks of lumpia, a church where “everyone is broken, but trying.” A multitudinous witness.  Kamara psalms from the nexus of many languages—Krio, English, French, poetry’s many dialects—to highlight mechanisms not just for survival, but for abundance. “I make myth for peace,” she writes, as well as for loss, for delight, for kinship, and most of all for a country where Black means “steadfast and opulent,” and “dangerous and infinite.” She writes for a new America, where praise is plentiful and Black lives flourish. But in Besaydoo , there is no partition between the living and the dead. There is no past nor present. There is, instead, a joyful simultaneity—a liberating togetherness sustained by song. The  Besaydoo audiobook read by Yalie Saweda Kamara is available everywhere you listen to audiobooks. Praise for Besaydoo “In her first full length collection, Kamara writes about the life of a daughter of Sierra Leonean immigrants to America and evokes her world of Oakland, California with ecstatic attention and generosity.” —New York Times Book Review “Yalie Saweda Kamara’s lucent poetry collection Besaydoo encircles matters of race, heritage, boundaries, and exchanging ‘worry for hope.’ [. . .] Eloquent, proud, and discerning, the poems of Besaydoo preserve the wary splendor of lived experience.” —Foreword Reviews  "Yalie Saweda Kamara draws from her Sierra Leonean and Oakland roots to craft this powerful celebration of memory, kinship, and the nature of Black identity." — Brittle Paper   “ Besaydoo is a tapestry of history, longing, and discovery. In this poetry collection, Yalie Saweda Kamara draws on her identity as a daughter and Sierra Leonian living in the United States to weave past, present, and future together into an inspiring ode to the journey of life.”— BellaNaija  “With playful fluency, Kamara creates a seamless tapestry, reveling in the rhythms of different languages as she threads her poems with Sierra Leonean Krio, English, and French. The collection’s title is a newly coined word synthesized from “be safe, dude,” spoken quickly. This gentle benediction, which Kamara musically repeats and layers, embodies the care that people extend to their families and their communities. VERDICT: This brief, quietly gorgeous audiobook reveals new meaning with every listen. A radiant addition to any poetry collection.” —Sarah Hashimoto, Library Journal , starred audiobook review “I love this book. I mean, goddamn, I  love  this book. I love how hard it tries, how much it loves, how it reaches and wonders and how it bears its bewilderment. I love how it sings, and how it talks. I love what it does with its hurt and its sorrow and its loss and its longing. And I love, maybe most of all, that  Besaydoo  is a prayer, a prayer for all of us, which Yalie Saweda Kamara reminds us a book sometimes can be.”— Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights “Yalie Saweda Kamara makes it clear that  Besaydoo  is made with a sound that can only be made with others—witnessing, living, trying to read. With exquisite attention and suppleness of mind, she writes a poetics of relation shimmering with simultaneity and wonder. This is a gorgeously fierce and tender work—deep, alongside, and ever with.”— aracelis girmay, author of the black maria “Sometimes, neighborhood is nation. And for the diasporic Black body, the City of Oakland is like a Station of the Cross. In Besaydoo, Yalie Saweda Kamara offers a love song dedicated to her hometown, a place shaped by humor, heartbreak, and humiliation. This debut poetry collection stands alone for its scope and aesthetic dexterity. Here, Kamara is radiant, tender, and true.” —Amaud Jamaul Johnson, author of Red Summer “Yalie Saweda Kamara’s  Besaydoo  is a thrilling book of poems that begins and ends in Oakland, her hometown, ‘the bucktoothed city that made you wish you never wore braces,’ but is steeped in her family’s roots in Sierra Leone. Her perspective is international, multilingual (Krio and French), and her poems multi-layered, probing, joyous in their humor, serious about matters of the soul, and brilliantly inventive. They celebrate members of her family, especially her mother, but also various aunties. She extends that relationship to others, such as Aunty Nina, the singer Nina Simone, whose transformation of Bob Dylan’s ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’