{"product_id":"besaydoo-poems-9781639550319","title":"Besaydoo: Poems","description":"\u003cb\u003eSelected by Amaud Jamaul Johnson for the 2023 Jake Adam York Prize, Yalie Saweda Kamara's \u003ci\u003eBesaydoo\u003c\/i\u003e is an elegantly wrought love song to home--as place, as people, as body, and as language.\u003c\/b\u003eA griot is a historian, a living repository of communal legacies with \"a story pulsing in every blood cell.\" In \u003ci\u003eBesaydoo\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.\u003cbr\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003eBesaydoo\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.\u003cb\u003eThe \u003ci\u003eBesaydoo\u003c\/i\u003e audiobook read by Yalie Saweda Kamara is available everywhere you listen to audiobooks.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYalie Saweda Kamara is a Sierra Leonean American writer, educator, and researcher from Oakland, California. Selected as the 2022-2023 Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate (2-year term) and a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, she is the editor of the anthology \u003cem\u003eWhat You Need to Know About Me: Young Writers on Their Experience of Immigration \u003c\/em\u003eand the author of the chapbooks \u003cem\u003eA Brief Biography of My Name \u003c\/em\u003eand \u003cem\u003eWhen the Living Sing\u003c\/em\u003e. Kamara earned a PhD in Creative Writing and English Literature from the University of Cincinnati. She is an assistant professor of English at Xavier University and resides in Cincinnati.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Milkweed Editions","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50606070530322,"sku":"9781639550319","price":11.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_01dcc342-3b93-4652-9b48-405202c7d3a7.jpg?v=1732288283","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/besaydoo-poems-9781639550319","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}