@article{800657,
      recid = {800657},
      author = {Ward, Jesmyn,},
      title = {Sing, unburied, sing : a novel /},
      pages = {289 pages ;},
      abstract = {"A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book  Award winner Jesmyn Ward. In Jesmyn Ward's first novel  since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones,  this singular American writer brings the archetypal road  novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on  Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament,  Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through  Mississippi's past and present that is both an intimate  portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle.  Ward is a major American writer, multiply awarded and  universally lauded, and in Sing, Unburied, Sing she is at  the height of her powers. Jojo and his toddler sister,  Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the  occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie,  on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is  simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her  dead brother, which only come to her when she's high; Mam  is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the  household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white  father of Leonie's children is released from prison, she  packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out  across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State  Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise.  Sing, Unburied, Sing grapples with the ugly truths at the  heart of the American story and the power, and limitations,  of the bonds of family. Rich with Ward's distinctive,  musical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic new  work and an essential contribution to American  literature"--},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/800657},
}