Ordinary Light : : a Memoir

Locations
Call Number: 921 Smith, Tracy, Adult Book / Nonfiction / Biography / Literary / Smith, Tracy K
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	921 Smith, Tracy	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Biography / Literary / Smith, Tracy K	4-week checkout	Due 05-20-2024

"This is a Borzoi book"--Title page verso.
Prologue: The Miracle -- I. My Book House -- Wild Kingdom -- Spirits and Demons -- Kin -- Leroy -- A Home in the World -- II. MGM -- Little Feats of Daring -- Total Adventure -- Book a Big Band -- A Necessary Rite -- Humor -- III. Uninvisible -- The Night Stalker -- Hot & Fast -- Shame -- Mother -- Epistolary -- Positive -- IV. Kathleen -- Something Better -- The Woman at the Well -- A Strange Thing to Do -- I, Too -- Testimony -- V. Another Dialect of the Soul -- Something Powerful at Her Side -- A Strange After -- Abide -- Clearances -- Epilogue: Dear God.
"A memoir about the author's coming of age as she grapples with her identity as an artist, her family's racial history, and her mother's death from cancer"-- Provided by publisher.
"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet: a deeply moving 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. Tracy K. Smith had a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of five children raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But after spending a summer in Alabama at her grandmother's home, she returns to California with a new sense of what it means for her to be black: from her mother's memories of picking cotton as a girl in her father's field for pennies a bushel, to her parents' involvement in the Civil Rights movement. These dizzying juxtapositions--between her family's past, her own comfortable present, and the promise of her future--will eventually compel her to act on her passions for love and 'ecstatic possibility,' and her desire to become a writer. But when her mother is diagnosed with cancer, which she says is part of God's plan, Tracy must learn a new way to love and look after someone whose beliefs she has outgrown. Written with a poet's precision and economy, this gorgeous, probing kaleidoscope of self and family offers us a universal story of belonging and becoming, and the ways we find and lose ourselves amid the places we call home"-- Provided by publisher.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Ordinary Light- A Memoir submitted by vicki browne on August 13, 2018, 2:13pm Tracy Smith, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for 'Life On Mars' is a craftsman. Words flow smoothly and the story seems somewhat ordinary, but lovingly laid out and engaging for the reader. Her parents are present, dependable, and very capable. Dad had been in the air force and then went to work on the Hubble Space Telescope and her Mom taught for a bit in adult learning, a devoted Christian, and came from Alabama. Tracy was in a gifted program and school and eventually was accepted at Harvard. Tracy's Mother was sick with cancer as Tracy finished up her undergraduate degree. On the subject of her own mothering Tracy says: "Dear God, please let me keep her/him in my life. Please let me always, always be her/his mother."