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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
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Memoirs

ORDINARY LIGHT

Tracy K. Smith

From the dazzlingly original Pulitzer Prize-winning poet: 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 three acclaimed books of poetry, including most recently Life on Mars, winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize, a New York Times Notable Book, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and a New Yorker, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. A professor of creative writing at Princeton University, she lives in Princeton with her family.

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Book Published 2015-03-01 by Borzoi Book / Knopf

Comments

With an abundance of love and wisdom, Tracy K. Smith has recalled her life ... This memoir is big and significant because it reminds us that the everyday is where we experience our common struggles, and that the everyday is at once common and ordinary, while also being singular and unique.

Smith’s memoir takes us far into the dimensions of experience with remarkable intimacy, tenderness and intelligence. Her self-scrutiny, her empathy, and her life-long quest to figure things out—in particular our bedeviling national aches, religion and race—make for an indelible self-portrait: moving, utterly clear and compulsively readable.

Ordinary Light is a lyrical, evocative and poignant memoir that is the best of that genre. Tracy K. Smith has created a poem in stunning prose, a book in which she holds the child she was in her adult hands, examining the things that bridge the two: memory, parents, siblings, time—and of course her extraordinary eye. The result is something quite beautiful.

Smith is a first-rate storyteller, and when lyricism and storytelling come together, expect Dickinson’s delight as a reader: gathering paradise in your hands as you turn the pages. Along with her place as one of our best young poets, Smith can now claim a place among the best of writers of prose.

ORDINARY LIGHT has made the NPR (National Public Radio) list of "best books of 2015" Read more...

“It’s no surprise that Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Smith’s memoir is exquisitely written. Or that she grabs you from the first sentence of the prologue: “She left us at night.” This brief introduction is an eloquent account of her mother’s last days and hours, and her own poignant private farewell. Her memoir is a search for her mother, through memories – visiting grandparents, interacting with much older brothers and sisters, encountering poetry for the first time, always aware of her mother’s presence. Smith folds us into her reveries and reminiscences with enormous grace, revealing the particularly vulnerable moments she experienced when she became a motherless daughter, and the lingering, everlasting question of what might have been, had her mother been with her into her own experience of becoming a mother herself. Ordinary Light is a lament, an homage, a discovery, a blessing.” Read more...

ORDINARY LIGHT was a finalist for the National Book Award non-fiction

...a candid, gracefully written account of dawning black consciousness.

Amazon Best Book of the Month: Memoir and Biography Category (March 2015) Ranked “Highbrow and Brilliant” in New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix (March 9, 2015)

A deeply moving memoir from the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet 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.

Deeply engaging and brilliantly written, Ordinary Light tells how a young woman, encountering ‘the mystery of death,’ explores and expands her own vibrant life—and discovers her voice as a gifted writer.