All tagged African American experience

Sing, Unburied, Sing

Sing, Unburied, Sing

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Many people have spoken of the power in Jesmyn Ward’s novel Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), but nothing can prepare its reader for the heart-wrenching narrative held within its pages. This story, told in alternating, first-person perspective, is a story of place. A native of the Mississippi Delta, Ward knows Sing, Unburied, Sing’s setting intimately. The delta, and its many unburied spirits, come to life in this moving coming-of-age story rich with themes of belonging, loss, addiction, and so much more.

Be Holding

Be Holding

Chris Mathers Jackson
Poetry, My List of Required Reads

Rarely does a book-length poem hold its reader as tenderly and intimately as Ross Gay’s Be Holding (2020) held me. I never would have thought I would encourage everyone I know to read an ode of sorts to basketball legend, Julius Erving (famously called Dr. J.), and yet here I sit, enthusiastically doing just that.

Red at the Bone

Red at the Bone

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction, My List of Required Reads

Jacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone (2019) is gut-punch of a book. Set amidst the Brooklyn brownstones (similar to previously reviewed A Woman is No Man), but in Woodson’s family drama novel, the families are African American. The family central to Red at the Bone is three generations deep that has carries many more generations’ trauma and stories, including the Tulsa massacre of migration out of 1921, the great migration north, teenage pregnancy, and the importance of saving for the future.