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. &8220;I am made from the obsession of detail,&8221; she writes, setting scenes from her own multifaceted legacy in sharp relief: the memory of her mother&8217;s singing, savory stacks of lumpia, a church where &8220;everyone is broken, but trying.&8221; A multitudinous witness.&160;Kamara psalms from the nexus of many languages&8212;Krio, English, French, poetry&8217;s many dialects&8212;to highlight mechanisms not just for survival, but for abundance.