Sing, Unburied, Sing

"“I like to think I know what death is.” With that first line, Jesmyn Ward’s latest novel takes off like a shot, with 13-year-old Jojo, stoic and old beyond his years, leading the way. What follows is a gripping story of struggle, family bonds and racial injustice, told in alternating chapters by multiple narrators: Jojo; his drug-addicted mother, Leonie; and the ghost of a young boy long dead but still aching for answers. Set along Ward’s native Mississippi Gulf Coast – the setting, too, for her last novel, the indelible Salvage the Bones – Sing, Unburied, Sing shows an author with a commanding voice and a big, unflinching heart."

"It is a novel that feels completely of our time and, without strain or pretense, carries forward the power of our literary tradition. I am attracted to the economy of her prose — words never get in the way of the intensity of the emotion."

""Sing, Unburied, Sing," by Jesmyn Ward"

"I love this book. It’s about how the past forms a person and a landscape. Spirits enter the story and haunt her characters. Jesmyn captures the landscape so profoundly well. The character Leonie, one of the three narrators in the novel, is going to get her husband out of Parchman Farm, a maximum security prison in a corner of the Delta. Leonie’s husband calls the prison a place for the dead, which fits with the way other Mississippi writers characterize it. Parchman, I believe, is like a physical wound on the landscape of the Mississippi Delta. Jesmyn never describes Parchman as a wound, yet through the intimacy of her prose you sense that she feels the same way I do about the place. And the book sheds light on how the Gulf Coast sees the rest of the state. People from the Gulf Coast say once you are above Forest County, it feels like a no man’s land because the intermingled Creole culture that distinguishes the Gulf Coast disappears above that line."