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Ordinary light : a memoir / Tracy K. Smith.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2015Edition: First editionDescription: 349 pages ; 22 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 0307962660 (cloth)
  • 9780307962669 (cloth)
Subject(s): Genre/Form:
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.
Scope and content: "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.Scope and content: "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.
Fiction notes: Click to open in new window
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library Biography Smith, T. S662 Available 33111007994342
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

"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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