Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

The National Book Award winner, one of the New York Times Best Five books of fiction in 2017, and most compellingly, read by Obama.  This is a compactly powerful read that will transport you to places you may not want to see, but you will not regret it.  The book will read easily and quickly, but it will stick with you.
This book demonstrates  the slow apocalypse being experienced by poor African Americans.  It is the story of a broken family living on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi.  Leonie is an uneducated black woman, high school drop out, a mother at 17, hooked on drugs, married to a white man named Michael whose cousin killed her brother and who is himself completing a jail sentence. Their son Jojo acts as a bridge between grandparents Pop and Mama (the only real parents in the story) and his toddler sister Kayla.
Hearing that Michael is about to be released from prison, Leonie, her children and her equally substance-addicted white friend Misty embark on a long trip north to meet him. It’s a road journey without epic or transcendent qualities: an often amusingly banal odyssey full of gas station ennui, dodgy drug deals, kids who teeter between nausea and ravenous hunger. On the return leg, when a police officer stops their car – with its motley crew of ex-cons and crystal meth fans – it seems probable that one of them will be gunned down, but somehow they don't.  There are no overt acts of injustice here, just the ravages of centuries of prejudice and a tilted playing field coming to continued fruition.

Sing, Unburied, Sing is effective as a short and poetic critique of US history. The landscapes it describes with forensic ferocity are toxic and uninhabitable.  To thrive, one must escape.