Besaydoo by Yalie Kamara

Milkweed Editions, January 2024, $16

A line in Yalie Saweda Kamara’s opening poem points to an overarching theme in her latest collection: “Yes, we mourn, but let us celebrate too.” Kamara’s firm poetic footprints step right into the messiness of it. Toxicity and sobriety dance on these pages to two different rhythms, sometimes in visual forms and shapes and spacing. Kamara’s courage to pick up her foot and take another step and plot another telling word is apparent in the many ways she shifts through the “mess.” In “Bloomington, Indiana Part I,” she points out, “This business of being careful is heavy. I commit tentatively.”

The collection as a whole varies wildly in poetic forms and styles—even haikus are tucked inside full-length poems. Line breaks make you ponder the construction of her intention. In addition to its must-read status, Besaydoo would be a good guide for any beginning poet shifting their way through styles to find what fits their tone and cadence.

We get into the thick of the stickiness in the visceral tale of her escape from the person who slipped her a roofie in a Paris bar—stumbling home before the drug took over all her limbs and senses. Or in “Grab Bag (May, 1998),” where Kamara poses questions to her sex ed teacher “two decades later.” “Ms. Smith: “How are boys learning to use their bodies like weapons, Ms. Smith / Why doesn’t he want to hear my voice, Ms. Smith / Why doesn’t he know the difference between a request and a demand, Ms. Smith? . . .”

And in the repeated refrain of, “Oakland is a killing field, they say” in her poem “Oakland as Home. Home as Myth,” she highlights the all too common reporting about crime and not culture in big cities like Chicago, Detroit, and LA. Oakland isn’t alone in the media’s myth-building portrayal, but Kamara’s full-senses touch on the topic is a soothing walk through blackberry thickets—“thickets of joy.”

Beyond the fiercely personal poems, we get an internal glimpse of a family’s closeness and distance, and family wisdom and advice, and “the familiar scent of kin . . .” and its broken tree. The book closes with a powerful look at family mourning, an insightful look at how a mother is affected by her child’s death.

Thank you, Milkweed, for the advance reader copy.