From the start, Jesmyn Ward's "Let Us Descend" is about power and violence in the antebellum South.

The protagonist, a teenager called Annis, states, "The first weapon I ever held was my mother's hand," and this knowledge about the need for empowerment sets her on her way. Strength through fighting is handed down from generations of mothers to daughters, even across the Atlantic before Annis' grandmother was captured. This knowledge is essential because of the brutality toward enslaved Black women's bodies and sexual violence from plantation owners, including Annis' own father.

Although damage is done to Annis' body, she finds the power of pleasure as well. After Annis' "sire" sells her mother, Annis becomes close with another teenager: "Safi has scooted back on the bed, her spine a fine line on mine. Warm, sure lightning. I burrow back into her and close my eyes." Their love story is a reprieve, a delight and a disruption to white patriarchy.

Eventually, Annis is forced on her own journey from the Carolinas to New Orleans. The title of the novel alludes to Dante's "Inferno" and reminds readers of the hell experienced during enslavement and on the teenager's march south. As she trudges along, Annis recalls a lesson from her mother: "The ancestors come if you call them." Annis takes up this other way of knowing when she connects to spirits, and this invocation points out how this book is in conversation with the Black American canon. Like Toni Morrison, Ward employs the power of the ancestors and lyricism.

In a eulogy about Morrison, Ward herself acknowledged this connection:

"Morrison called me out of my wandering, her words, whole sentences, whole paragraphs, speaking to me as none had ever done so before. ... Here was language as jarring as baby venom, crafted to disrupt, to immerse, to reveal. Here was poetry and tension and vivid, evocative imagery. ... In short, here was home."

Ward finds a traveling companion in Morrison's style and employs some of these elements for Annis, even as Ward makes them her own. While the poetic sections will require a focused reader, powerful moments of people roped together while crossing a river or a mother reminding her daughter to "breathe" add up on this haunting journey — where Annis calls upon those around her, those separated from her, those who came before her and herself.

Ward has impressed with her heart-rending "Men We Reaped" and earned National Book Awards for both "Salvage the Bones" and "Sing, Unburied, Sing." Now, "Let Us Descend" joins a list of distinguished neo-slave narratives — stories about much more than slavery that include Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad," Octavia Butler's "Kindred" and, of course, Morrison's "Beloved."

Abby Manzella is the author of "Migrating Fictions: Gender, Race, and Citizenship in U.S. Internal Migrations."

Let Us Descend

By: Jesmyn Ward.

Publisher: 320 pages, Scribner, $28.

Event: Reading/signing, 7:30 p.m. Oct. 26, Northrop Family Stage, 84 SE. Church St., Mpls. Free; registration required at cla.umn.edu.