Murder Ballad

**Co-winner of the 2013 Shelia Motton Book Award** “The landscape, the family, the incidental characters that enter both books have this fantastically grounded reality where you doubt and believe their existences at the same time.” —*The Rumpus* “[*Murder Ballad* is] ripe with all the textures of bayous, swamp cypress, underwater muck, and the ‘damp implosion of woodscent.'” —*New Orleans Review* “Not since I read James Agee’s *A Death in the Family* have I been so compelled to stare into the eyeballs of chiggers and mildew. Jane Springer is on a thin reed in the present moment reciting incantatory poems. May I plainly say, ‘What a goddamn beautiful book this is.'” —Jane Miller “I have a feeling Jane Springer met the devil at the crossroads. There’s not a note she can’t pluck, and the music is like no one else’s: rich as the red clay of Georgia, startling as a raccoon’s bite, ‘crazy as a shithouse rat’ and cool as sweet tea on a sultry afternoon. There’s some nittygritty here, hauled up from the freezer chest on the porch, unearthed like a mastodon that’s been buried far longer than we can imagine. And there is tremendous vitality and sublimity in this ‘dark county of the heart’ wh