Clad in a thin robe and her son’s sneakers, Elena Richardson stands on the lawn watching as every remnant of her perfectly planned life turns to ash. Her three children contemplatively observe as firemen extinguish the charred remains of their childhood home. Arranged in neat row on the hood of a car, they are acutely aware of the problematic fact…
-
-
Jesmyn Ward’s ‘Sing, Unburied, Sing’: Riding in Cars with Ghosts
Jesmyn Ward is a poet who writes novels. The lyricism of her prose starkly contrasts the gritty realism of her plots, but that is part of the joy of reading her. Her novels hold a gilded mirror to life’s imperfections. Her characters live in a world where murder can be termed as a “hunting accident” so long as the victim…
