The writing is smooth and the imagery clear in this memoir of the author's loss of her mother just as the author was coming into adulthood herself. It's interesting to read about parents who were still energetic and engaged in raising their fifth child when my own parents were pretty checked out by number three. ( )

"Ordinary Light" by Tracy K. Smith, was an interesting memoir by a fine American poet. Smith was our U.S. Poet Laureate from 2017 to 2019. The only drawback to the book for me was personal, it was all the god talk, but I knew to expect it from her poetry and hearing her speak.

Myself, I’m still mourning the end of her poetry podcast, The Slowdown, which shut down at the end of October of 2020. Monday through Friday she would choose a poem to read and tell how she related to it. I loved the sound and the enthusiasm in her voice during those memorable five-minute poetry pieces. On my darkest days, those five minutes were a bright little break from my internal bleakness. I would sometimes save them up for the rough times.

She starts the book with herself and her siblings, there are five of them gathered around her mother’s deathbed. They are all attempting to ease their mother’s pain as she slips away. I found myself very moved when she wrote of her mother’s suffering and cancer. It reached even deeper into my heart when she mentioned their in-home hospice care.

I found the following line fascinating as she relates to sexual relations. “I started to write a play in which a woman sitting up naked in her bed was having a version of this conversation with herself, describing what it felt like to lie down under the weight of her lover and feel the rest of the world slide off the edge of the bed.” I simply love that last phrase, “feel the rest of the world slide off the edge of the bed.”

Another time she writes about the years when her mother so missed her dad. He was away working Monday through Friday, staying at his Silicon Valley apartment, while the rest of the family continued to live in Fairfield. “Maybe that longing had planted the first seed of the cancer. If not that, then surely, he’d done something else. He was a man, after all; wasn’t that crime enough?”

The last paragraph of the book is a sweet remembrance from Tracy’s childhood, when she was intertwined with her mother while lying on the couch.
“Mommy?”
“Yes, Tracy?” she’ll ask, calmly, once I have punctured her sleep with my need to hear her voice, to feel it rise through her and hum against my ear.
“Oh, nothing.” I’ll answer. “Nothing.”

It was wonderful when Tracy did write about her writing and her poetry, but there wasn’t as much as I had hoped for in the book. Of poetry she wrote at one point, “I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by—the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to.”

It was a curious book. It tends to be centered around her being a daughter, a granddaughter, and in the end, a mother to her daughter. Though I’m sure that I missed out on much of what she wrote, because I am none of those things, I found the book very direct and thoughtful. ( )

One of Smith’s gifts seems to be in shingin light on how the ordinary is, in and of itself, quite extraordinary. ( )

Beautifully and completely relate-able as we are all daughters. Language and text were so elegant. Poignant story of a young girl's coming of age, her place in the family, her relationship to her mother and in the world. ( )

She says this book is about her relationship with her mom but I found this the least interesting part. Her growing up was more interesting. I did find it interesting how few jobs she had. She seemed to be sitting around a lot. Lucky girl! ( )