Sing, Unburied, Sing: A Novel

"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."