Ordinary Light: A Memoir (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780307962669)

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.

Author: Tracy K. Smith
ISBN-10: 0307962660
ISBN-13: 9780307962669
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Language: English
Published: 03/31/2015
Pages: 368
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.20lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.20w x 1.50d
Award: National Book Awards - Finalist

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 12/15/2014
Booklist 02/01/2015 pg. 18
Publishers Weekly 03/02/2015
Essence 04/01/2015 pg. 58
Shelf Awareness 04/03/2015
BookPage 04/01/2015
New York Times Book Review 05/03/2015 pg. 13
New York Times Book Review 05/10/2015 pg. 34
New Yorker (The) 08/03/2015 pg. 73
NY Times Notable Bks of Year 12/06/2015 pg. 28