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Ordinary Light: A Memoir
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Ordinary Light: A Memoir Hardcover - 2015

by Tracy K. Smith


From the publisher

National Book Award Finalist From the dazzlingly original Pulitzer Prize-winning poet hailed for her "extraordinary range and ambition" (The New York Times Book Review): a quietly potent memoir that explores coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter. The youngest of five children, Tracy K. Smith was raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But just as Tracy is about to leave home for college, her mother is diagnosed with cancer, a condition she accepts as part of God's plan. Ordinary Light is the story of a young woman struggling to fashion her own understanding of belief, loss, history, and what it means to be black in America. In lucid, clear prose, Smith interrogates her childhood in suburban California, her first collision with independence at Harvard, and her Alabama-born parents' recollections of their own youth in the Civil Rights era. These dizzying juxtapositions--of her family's past, her own comfortable present, and the promise of her future--will in due course compel Tracy to act on her passions for love and "ecstatic possibility," and her desire to become a writer. Shot through with exquisite lyricism, wry humor, and an acute awareness of the beauty of everyday life, Ordinary Light is a gorgeous kaleidoscope of self and family, one that skillfully combines a child's and teenager's perceptions with adult retrospection. Here is a universal story of being and becoming, a classic portrait of the ways we find and lose ourselves amid the places we call home.

Details

  • Title Ordinary Light: A Memoir
  • Author Tracy K. Smith
  • Binding Hardcover
  • Edition First Edition; F
  • Pages 368
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Knopf Publishing Group, New York
  • Date 2015-03
  • ISBN 9780307962669 / 0307962660
  • Weight 1.2 lbs (0.54 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.3 x 5.2 x 1.5 in (21.08 x 13.21 x 3.81 cm)
  • Themes
    • Aspects (Academic): Life Writings
    • Ethnic Orientation: African American
    • Sex & Gender: Feminine
  • Library of Congress subjects Mothers and daughters - United States, African Americans - Race identity
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 2014026185
  • Dewey Decimal Code B

Media reviews

Citations

  • Booklist, 02/01/2015, Page 18
  • BookPage, 04/01/2015, Page 0
  • Essence, 04/01/2015, Page 58
  • Kirkus Reviews, 12/15/2014, Page 0
  • New York Times Book Review, 05/10/2015, Page 34
  • New Yorker (The), 08/03/2015, Page 73
  • NY Times Notable Bks of Year, 12/06/2015, Page 28
  • Publishers Weekly, 03/02/2015, Page 0
  • Shelf Awareness, 04/03/2015, Page 0

About the author

TRACY K. SMITH is the United States Poet Laureate. She is the author of four acclaimed books of poetry, including Wade in the Water and Life on Mars, winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize, a New York Times Notable Book, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, and a New Yorker, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. A professor of creative writing at Princeton University, she lives in Princeton with her family.
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Ordinary Light: A Memoir

Ordinary Light: A Memoir

by Smith, Tracy K

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Ordinary Light : A Memoir
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Ordinary Light : A Memoir
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Ordinary Light : A Memoir

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Ordinary Light: A memoir
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Ordinary Light: A memoir
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