- 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.
- In Ordinary Light, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Tracy K. Smith tells her remarkable story, giving us a quietly potent memoir that explores her coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter. Here is the story of a young artist struggling to fashion her own.
- Smith nominates Charlton Heston and Ziggy Stardust as emissaries of the beyond, and they descend, puckish and melancholy, as embodied spoofs of man’s need to view Creator as character. As it too becomes a meditation on the lapses in language, Ordinary Light takes up the other end of the telescope; its concerns are personal rather than public.
Cover of Tracy K. Smith’s “Ordinary Light” Since I heard her speak as part of the Houston Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series in Februa r y, 2016, I’ve had a deeply personal resonance with Tracy K. Flightradar24 pro for mac. At the time, Smith was the poet laureate of the United States, and her voice — so deeply rhythmic, elegant, calming,.
- 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.
'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.
Smith, Tracy K.--Family.
African American women authors--Biography.
Mothers--United States--Death.
Mothers and daughters--United States.
Coming of age--United States.
Home--Psychological aspects.
African Americans--Race identity.
Identity (Psychology)--United States.
Poets--Psychology.
0307962660 (cloth)
9780307962676 (ebook)
Holdings
- Library
- Blmgtn - Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center Library
- Call Number
- PS3619.M5955 Z46 2015
- Location
- Stacks
- text this call number
- Library
- South Bend - Schurz Library
- Call Number
- PS3619.M5955 Z46 2015
- Location
- Stacks
- Floor
- 5th Floor
- text this call number
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Not affiliated with Indiana University (licensed resources not accessible off-campus)Ordinary Light Tracy K Smith Pdf
| Author | Tracy K. Smith |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Memoir |
| Publisher | Alfred A. Knopf |
| April 2, 2015 | |
| Media type | Print, Ebook |
| Pages | 368 |
| Awards | Finalist, National Book Award for Nonfiction |
| ISBN | 978-0-307-96266-9 (hardcover) |
| Website | Ordinary Light at Penguin Random House |
Ordinary Light: A Memoir is a 2015 book by poet Tracy K. Smith. It was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Development and publication history[edit]
Smith described the process of writing the memoir as becoming 'an investigator of [her] own life,' comparing recollections with her siblings and finding memory to be a 'flawed lens.'[1] She began writing Ordinary Light in 2009, though had long wanted to write the memoir, born of a desire to write about her mother who passed away in 1994 as Smith was graduating from college; Smith made initial efforts beginning in 1999 but found the pieces difficult to finish.[2] Later, working with German writer Hans Manus Enzensberger in the context of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, Smith found the structure of exchanging work as well as Enzensberger's feedback helped move the project forward.[2] Smith has also said becoming a parent herself—her daughter was an infant when Smith was writing the book--gave her insight necessary to writing about her mother: 'Not only did I have access to my own feelings and recollections but suddenly I had a way of imagining what my mother, as a parent, might have been thinking and worrying about, and weighing in her mind.'[2]
Photo booths for mac. The 368-page book was published by Alfred A. Knopf on April 2, 2015.[3]
Content and style[edit]
Writing in Slate, Stacia L. Brown says 'most of the time', Ordinary Light is 'a coming-of-age story about a middle-class black girl with a relatively idyllic life..the story of the healthy, nurturing bond between a black mother and daughter.' However, Brown found the book 'most powerful when it returns to the subject' with which Smith opens the narrative: 'her mother’s illness and Smith’s slow-dawning realization that she will not recover'—Smith's mother died shortly after Smith graduated from college.[4]
Smith, whose first books were poetry, has said that in retrospect, the move to writing in prose was a necessity for her to engage the story of her relationship with her mother. Mac address for my iphone. 'I had found a way of exploring my own private material in poems. I knew the kinds of answers—that’s not the right noun because I don't think a poem solves things—but I knew the kind of encounter I was capable of creating in a poem. I realized that if I wanted to get something new out of that material I needed to shift languages.'[2]
Reception[edit]
Ordinary Light received widely favorable reviews[5][6][7] and was named a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction.[8][9][10]
Tracy K Smith
References[edit]
Life On Mars Poem
- ^Beretto, Holly (February 17, 2016). 'Ordinary Light by Pulitzer Prize Winner Tracy K. Smith Looks at the Extraordinary of the Everyday'. Houston Press. Retrieved June 14, 2017.
- ^ abcdNguyen, Sophia (April 9, 2015). 'A Conversation with Tracy K. Smith '94'. Harvard Magazine. Retrieved June 14, 2017.
- ^'ORDINARY LIGHT by Tracy K. Smith'. Kirkus Reviews. December 7, 2014. Retrieved June 14, 2017.
- ^Brown, Stacia L. (May 8, 2015). 'An Everyday Transcendence'. Slate. Retrieved June 14, 2017.
- ^Lozada, Carlos (April 30, 2015). ''Did I ever wonder who my mother used to be, before she belonged to me?''. The Washington Post. Retrieved June 14, 2017.
- ^Chee, Alexander (April 3, 2015). 'Ordinary Light by Tracy K Smith review - powerful meditation on daughters and mothers'. The Guardian. Retrieved June 14, 2017.
- ^Pinckney, Darryl (April 28, 2015). ''Ordinary Light: A Memoir,' by Tracy K. Smith'. The New York Times. Retrieved June 14, 2017.
- ^'2015 National Book Awards'. nationalbook.org. National Book Foundation. Retrieved June 14, 2017.
- ^Halperin, Moze (October 14, 2015). ''Between the World and Me' and 'A Little Life' Lead the National Book Awards Finalists'. Flavorwire. Retrieved June 14, 2017.
- ^Dwyer, Colin (October 14, 2015). 'Finalists Unveiled For This Year's National Book Awards'. NPR. Retrieved June 14, 2017.