Tracy K. Smith, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2012 for “Life on Mars,” tells her life story, so far, in “Ordinary Light.” Her memoir traces her girlhood in a mostly white suburb in northern California to her years at Harvard, where she developed “an intimate proximity” with her African-American identity.
“Ordinary Light” shines bright not because of extraordinary events that occurred in Smith’s life but because of the warm glow the memoir casts on the simple everyday life of a young girl yearning to do great things. “What I really wanted was to be gifted,” she writes, “someone with the ability to discern important things.”
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