{"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 will be available everywhere you listen to audiobooks on January 9, 2024.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eBinding Type:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Milkweed Editions\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 01\/09\/2024\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN:\u003c\/b\u003e 9781639550319\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 96","brand":"Yalie Saweda Kamara","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43271913996469,"sku":"9781639550319","price":13.6,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0473\/0804\/6492\/files\/img_a933839c-484a-46ab-9560-4dce151f6df7.jpg?v=1699958608","url":"https:\/\/pastforward.org\/products\/besaydoo-poems-9781639550319","provider":"Past Forward","version":"1.0","type":"link"}