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BookPrinted Material
Author Smith, Tracy K.

Title Ordinary light : a memoir / Tracy K. Smith.

Publication Info. New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.

Item Status

Location Call No. Status OPAC Message Public Note Gift Note
 Moore Stacks  PS3619.M5955 Z46 2015    Available  ---
Edition First edition.
Description 349 pages ; 22 cm
age Children
Note "This is a Borzoi book"--Title page verso.
Summary "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.
Contents 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.
Subject Smith, Tracy K.
Smith, Tracy K.
Smith, Tracy K. -- Family.
Families.
African American women poets -- Biography.
African American women poets.
Genre/Form Biographies.
Subject African American women authors -- Biography.
African American women authors -- Biography.
African American women authors.
Mothers -- United States -- Death.
Mothers.
United States.
Death.
Mothers and daughters -- United States.
Mothers and daughters.
Coming of age -- United States.
Coming of age.
Home -- Psychological aspects.
Home -- Psychological aspects.
African Americans -- Race identity.
African Americans -- Race identity.
Identity (Psychology) -- United States.
Identity (Psychology)
Poets -- Psychology.
Poets -- Psychology.
Poets.
Coming of age -- United States -- Juvenile literature.
Mothers -- Death.
Genre/Form Autobiographies.
Subject Mothers.
Genre/Form Autobiographies.
ISBN 9780307962669 (cloth)
0307962660 (cloth)
9780307962676 (ebook)