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 rediscovering herself. ampamp8220I am made from the obsession of detailampamp8221 she writes setting scenes from her own multifaceted legacy in sharp relief the memory of her motherampamp8217s singing savory stacks of lumpia a church where ampamp8220everyone is broken but trying.ampamp8221 A multitudinous witness.ampamp160Kamara psalms from the nexus of many languagesampamp8212Krio English French poetryampamp8217s many dialectsampamp8212to highlight mechanisms not just for survival but for abundance.