{"product_id":"book-e24b","title":"Ordinary Light","description":"Positioning Statement 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. Description 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. Key Selling Points - ACCLAIM: The narrative debut of a critics' darling whose name is instantly recognizable among reviewers. Parts of this memoir expand, in prose, upon the elegy for Smith's father that was the centerpiece of her most recent, Pulitzer-winning collection, Life on Mars, which was also a New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal Best Book of the Year, a New York TimesNotable Book of 2011, and a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. - AUTHOR: Smith is a brilliant and charismatic presence who has lectured widely across the U.S. Her frankness about herself and her family in Ordinary Light will attract reader engagement, book-group discussion, and the review community. - MOTHER-DAUGHTER STORY: The memoir, framed by the complex relationship between a mother and daughter, is perfect for Mother's Day. - EVOCATIVE PROSE: Smith conjures her home and family with vivid, visceral imagery and a richly textured sense of place in a wholly accessible voice. She skillfully combines a child's and teenager's perceptions with adult retrospection, giving Ordinary Light the feel of a classic","brand":"Recorded Books, Inc.","offers":[{"title":"Audio CD","offer_id":49386637361456,"sku":"ZEe24b","price":44.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Audiobook [BD]","offer_id":49386637394224,"sku":"BDe24b","price":24.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0879\/2784\/9264\/files\/205583-e24b-Square.jpg?v=1735172830","url":"https:\/\/downpour.com\/products\/book-e24b","provider":"Downpour","version":"1.0","type":"link"}