Ordinary Light
Click to look inside
World of Books
The feel-good place to buy books
Ordinary Light by Tracy K Smith
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.Tracy K. Smith is the author of four poetry books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Wade in the Water and Life on Mars. She was named Poet Laureate of the United States in 2017. She is a Princeton University professor.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780345804075 |
| ISBN 10 | 0345804074 |
| Title | Ordinary Light |
| Author | Tracy K Smith |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Random House USA Inc |
| Year published | 2016-03-08 |
| Number of pages | 368 |
| Prizes | Short-listed for National Book Award Finalist 2015 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |