Besaydoo: Poems

(Paperback)

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Selected by Amaud Jamaul Johnson for the 2023 Jake Adam York Prize, Yalie Saweda Kamaras Besaydoo is an elegantly wrought love song to homeas 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 mothers singing, savory stacks of lumpia, a church where everyone is broken, but trying. A multitudinous witness.

Kamara psalms from the nexus of many languagesKrio, English, French, poetrys many dialectsto 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 simultaneitya liberating togetherness sustained by song.

Reviews

Praise for Besaydoo

Sometimes, neighborhood is nation. And for the diasporic Black body, the City of Oakland is like a Station of the Cross. InBesaydoo,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 Jamal Johnson, author of Red Summer

Praise for When the Living Sing

A luminescent collection. To read Yalie Saweda Kamaras first book is to welcome a wholly original new voice into the American chorusa searching, joyful, wry, aching voiceand know she will be heard from as long as she has breath.Dave Eggers, author of The Every

When The Living Sing is a stunning and lush collection, teeming with bright music. Here, the mouth is a doorway and a dirge to what beckons and consumes the speakers tongue declaring, I become a lyre bird mimicking their sound, unsure of what grief means in the hyphen of my African and American throat. Here, the pulpy lava bullet of the malombo fruit tethers memory to family in Sierra Leone and Oakland, California. Here, the elegy is housed in the sanctuary of praise by traversing the distances woven with slices of Krio, Black death, and always finding joy amidst sorrow. Yalie Saweda Kamara is a poet with a gorgeous and wild imagination that conjures the opal hue of Gods touch and the blueberry gauze of nightfall. I never wanted the chapbook to end.Tiana Clark, author of I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood

Praise for A Brief Biography of My Name

There are moments in Yalie Kamaras A Brief Biography of My Name where the words disappear, leaving the reader with nothing but feeling, and the sound of their own breathing. Subjects of her poems grab the mike, speaking back to her. Her poems cross the distance between the poets memory and the readers mind, creating an intimacy that is not always pleasurable, even if always truthful...

Kamaras voice emanates from the pages, recalling the oral origins of poetry; an affirmation of community; a sound that crumbles defenses and rationality; sure as a drum, as an instrument; from the opening poem until the last line dies into the silence that birthed it. This is life, given a proper and delicious weight.Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, writer and performance artist, author of Original Skin

Author Bio

Yalie Saweda Kamara is the author of Besaydoo, winner of the 2023 Jake Adam York Prize. She is a Sierra Leonean American writer, educator, and researcher from Oakland, California and the 20222023 Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate. She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the National Book Critics Circle, and Callaloo. Kamaras poetry, fiction, interviews, and translations have been published in The Adroit Journal, Callaloo, Black Camera, Puerto del Sol,and elsewhere. She is the Director of Creative Youth Leadership at WordPlay Cincy and is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati.