Download or read book Ordinary Light written by Tracy K. Smith and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-03-31 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • This dazzling memoir from the former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Life on Mars is the story of a young artist struggling to fashion her own understanding of belief, loss, history, and what it means to be black in America. "Engrossing in its spare, simple understatement.... Evocative ... luminous." —The Washington Post 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.
Download or read book Ordinary Girls written by Jaquira Díaz and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the Must-Read Books of 2019 According to O: The Oprah Magazine * Time * Bustle * Electric Literature * Publishers Weekly * The Millions * The Week * Good Housekeeping “There is more life packed on each page of Ordinary Girls than some lives hold in a lifetime.” —Julia Alvarez In this searing memoir, Jaquira Díaz writes fiercely and eloquently of her challenging girlhood and triumphant coming of age. While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Díaz found herself caught between extremes. As her family split apart and her mother battled schizophrenia, she was supported by the love of her friends. As she longed for a family and home, her life was upended by violence. As she celebrated her Puerto Rican culture, she couldn’t find support for her burgeoning sexual identity. From her own struggles with depression and sexual assault to Puerto Rico’s history of colonialism, every page of Ordinary Girls vibrates with music and lyricism. Díaz writes with raw and refreshing honesty, triumphantly mapping a way out of despair toward love and hope to become her version of the girl she always wanted to be. Reminiscent of Tara Westover’s Educated, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, and Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries, Jaquira Díaz’s memoir provides a vivid portrait of a life lived in (and beyond) the borders of Puerto Rico and its complicated history—and reads as electrically as a novel.
Download or read book Ordinary written by Michael Horton and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Radical. Crazy. Transformative and restless. Every word we read these days seems to suggest there’s a “next-best-thing,” if only we would change our comfortable, compromising lives. In fact, the greatest fear most Christians have is boredom—the sense that they are missing out on the radical life Jesus promised. One thing is certain. No one wants to be “ordinary.” Yet pastor and author Michael Horton believes that our attempts to measure our spiritual growth by our experiences, constantly seeking after the next big breakthrough, have left many Christians disillusioned and disappointed. There’s nothing wrong with an energetic faith; the danger is that we can burn ourselves out on restless anxieties and unrealistic expectations. What’s needed is not another program or a fresh approach to spiritual growth; it’s a renewed appreciation for the commonplace. Far from a call to low expectations and passivity, Horton invites readers to recover their sense of joy in the ordinary. He provides a guide to a sustainable discipleship that happens over the long haul—not a quick fix that leaves readers empty with unfulfilled promises. Convicting and ultimately empowering, Ordinary is not a call to do less; it’s an invitation to experience the elusive joy of the ordinary Christian life.
Download or read book In Ordinary Light written by Darrell Bourque and published by University of Louisiana. This book was released on 2010 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Ordinary Light: New and Selected Poems" is a compilation of poems written by Darrell Bourque, Louisiana's Poet Laureate, over the last forty years. It includes selected poems from all the previously published volumes, all the poems from "The Blue Boat," and all the poems written by Bourque from "Call and Response: Conversations in Verse" (written with Jack B. Bedell).
Download or read book Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love written by Keith S. Wilson and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2020-01-15 with total page 71 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "“Wilson’s collection is romantic yet world-weary, bereaved yet fortified―a kindred reflection of the heart in the modern world.” ―Publishers Weekly Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love is a collection whose poems approach family, politics, and romance, often through the lens of space: the vagaries of a relationship full of wonder and coldness, separation and exploration. There is the sense of the speaker as a cartographer of familiar spaces, of land he has never left or relationships that have stayed with him for years, and always with the newness of an alien or stranger. Acutely attuned to the heritage of Greco-Roman myth, Wilson writes through characters such as the Basilisk and the Minotaur, emphasizing the intense loneliness these characters experience from their uniqueness. For the racially ambiguous speaker of these poems, who is both black and not black, who has lived between the American South and the Midwest, there are no easy answers. From the fields of Kentucky to the pigeon coops of Chicago, identities and locations blur—the pastoral bleeds into the Afrofuturist, black into white and back again."
Download or read book The Body s Question written by Tracy K. Smith and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The debut collection by the Poet Laureate of the United States * Winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize * You are pure appetite. I am pure Appetite. You are a phantom In that far-off city where daylight Climbs cathedral walls, stone by stolen stone. --from "Self-Portrait as the Letter Y" The Body's Question by Tracy K. Smith received the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African-American poet, selected by Kevin Young. Confronting loss, historical intersections with race and family, and the threshold between childhood and adulthood, Smith gathers courage and direction from the many disparate selves encountered in these poems, until, as she writes, "I was anyone I wanted to be."
Download or read book Ordinary Hazards written by Nikki Grimes and published by Astra Publishing House. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael L. Printz Honor Book Robert F. Sibert Informational Honor Book Boston Globe/Horn Book Nonfiction Honor Book Arnold Adoff Poetry Award for Teens Six Starred Reviews—★Booklist ★BCCB ★The Horn Book ★Publishers Weekly ★School Library Connection ★Shelf Awareness A Booklist Best Book for Youth * A BCCB Blue Ribbon * A Horn Book Fanfare Book * A Shelf Awareness Best Children's Book * Recommended on NPR's "Morning Edition" by Kwame Alexander "This powerful story, told with the music of poetry and the blade of truth, will help your heart grow."–Laurie Halse Anderson, author of Speak and Shout "[A] testimony and a triumph."–Jason Reynolds, author of Long Way Down In her own voice, acclaimed author and poet Nikki Grimes explores the truth of a harrowing childhood in a compelling and moving memoir in verse. Growing up with a mother suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and a mostly absent father, Nikki Grimes found herself terrorized by babysitters, shunted from foster family to foster family, and preyed upon by those she trusted. At the age of six, she poured her pain onto a piece of paper late one night - and discovered the magic and impact of writing. For many years, Nikki's notebooks were her most enduing companions. In this accessible and inspiring memoir that will resonate with young readers and adults alike, Nikki shows how the power of those words helped her conquer the hazards - ordinary and extraordinary - of her life.
Download or read book Struggling for Ordinary written by Andre Cavalcante and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-03-06 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth look at the role of media in the struggle for transgender inclusion From television shows like Orange is the New Black and Transparent, to the real-life struggles of Caitlyn Jenner splashed across the headlines, transgender visibility is on the rise. But what was it like to live as a transgender person in a media environment before this transgender boom in television? While pop culture imaginations of transgender identity flourish and shape audience’s perceptions of trans identities, what does this new media visibility mean for transgender individuals themselves? Struggling for Ordinary engagingly answers these questions, offering a snapshot of how transgender individuals made their way toward a sense of ordinary life by integrating available media into their everyday experiences. Drawing on in-depth interviews with transgender communities, Andre Cavalcante offers a richly detailed account of how the media impacts the lives and experiences of transgender individuals. He grippingly looks at the emotional toll that media takes on this population along with their resilience in the face of disempowerment. Deeply rooted in the life stories of transgender people, the book uses everyday circumstances to show how media and technology operate as a medium through which transgender individuals are able to cultivate an understanding of their identities, build inhabitable worlds, and achieve the routine affordances of everyday life from which they are often excluded. Expertly researched and eloquently argued, Struggling for Ordinary sheds a fascinating new light of the everyday struggles of individuals and communities, to seek a life in which transgender identity is fully integrated into the ordinary.
Download or read book Ordinary Matter written by Laura Elvery and published by Univ. of Queensland Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1895 Alfred Nobel rewrote his will and left his fortune made in dynamite and munitions to generations of thinkers. Since 1901 women have been honoured with Nobel Prizes for their scientific research twenty times, including Marie Curie twice. Spanning more than a century and ranging across the world, this inventive story collection is inspired by these women whose work has altered history and saved millions of lives. From a transformative visit to the Grand Canyon to a baby washing up on a Queensland beach, a climate protest during a Paris heatwave to Stockholm on the eve of the 1977 Nobel Prize ceremony, Ordinary Matter explores the nature of ingenuity and discovery, motherhood and sacrifice, illness and legacy. Sometimes the extraordinary pivots on the ordinary.
Download or read book Heaven in Ordinary written by Malcolm Guite and published by Canterbury Press. This book was released on 2020-09-30 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poet's Corner is Malcolm Guite's delectable column that appears on the back page of the Church Times each week. This second collection brings together more than seventy columns created from little glimpses and reflections from all corners of the country, the musings of a poet's mind, and the corners and alleyways of our literary heritage. Malcolm's lucid, perceptive and imaginative columns follow a similar pattern to the sonnets for which he is so renowned, with a sense of development, of a turn or volta part way through, and a sense that the end revisits and re-reads the opening.
Download or read book Ordinary Grace written by William Kent Krueger and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes an excerpt from William Kent Krueger's "This tender land."
Download or read book Darkness Falls on the Land of Light written by Douglas L. Winiarski and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-02-09 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This sweeping history of popular religion in eighteenth-century New England examines the experiences of ordinary people living through extraordinary times. Drawing on an unprecedented quantity of letters, diaries, and testimonies, Douglas Winiarski recovers the pervasive and vigorous lay piety of the early eighteenth century. George Whitefield's preaching tour of 1740 called into question the fundamental assumptions of this thriving religious culture. Incited by Whitefield and fascinated by miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit--visions, bodily fits, and sudden conversions--countless New Englanders broke ranks with family, neighbors, and ministers who dismissed their religious experiences as delusive enthusiasm. These new converts, the progenitors of today's evangelical movement, bitterly assaulted the Congregational establishment. The 1740s and 1750s were the dark night of the New England soul, as men and women groped toward a restructured religious order. Conflict transformed inclusive parishes into exclusive networks of combative spiritual seekers. Then as now, evangelicalism emboldened ordinary people to question traditional authorities. Their challenge shattered whole communities.
Download or read book Such Color written by Tracy K. Smith and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Tracy K. Smith’s poetry is an awakening itself.” —Vogue Celebrated for its extraordinary intelligence and exhilarating range, the poetry of Tracy K. Smith opens up vast questions. Such Color: New and Selected Poems, her first career-spanning volume, traces an increasingly audacious commitment to exploring the unknowable, the immense mysteries of existence. Each of Smith’s four collections moves farther outward: when one seems to reach the limits of desire and the body, the next investigates the very sweep of history; when one encounters death and the outer reaches of space, the next bears witness to violence against language and people from across time and delves into the rescuing possibilities of the everlasting. Smith’s signature voice, whether in elegy or praise or outrage, insists upon vibrancy and hope, even—and especially—in moments of inconceivable travesty and grief. Such Color collects the best poems from Smith’s award-winning books and culminates in thirty pages of brilliant, excoriating new poems. These new works confront America’s historical and contemporary racism and injustices, while they also rise toward the registers of the ecstatic, the rapturous, and the sacred—urging us toward love as a resistance to everything that impedes it. This magnificent retrospective affirms Smith’s place as one of the twenty-first century’s most treasured poets.
Download or read book The Extraordinary Gift of Being Ordinary written by Ronald D. Siegel and published by Guilford Publications. This book was released on 2021-12-09 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Did I sound stupid?" "Should I have sent that email?" "How do I look?" Many of us spend a lot of time feeling self-conscious and comparing ourselves to others. Why do we judge ourselves so relentlessly? Why do we strive so hard to be special or successful, or to avoid feeling rejected? When psychologist and mindfulness expert Dr. Ronald Siegel realized that he, as well as most of his clients, was caught in a cycle of endless self-evaluation, he decided to do something about it. This engaging, empowering guide sheds light on this very human habit--and explains how to break it. Through illuminating stories and exercises, practical tools (which you can download and print for repeated use), and guided meditations with accompanying audio downloads, Dr. Siegel invites you to stop obsessing so much about how you measure up. Instead, by accepting the extraordinary gift of being ordinary, you can build stronger connections with others and get more joy out of life.
Download or read book Life on Mars written by Tracy K. Smith and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 79 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize * Poet Laureate of the United States * * A New York Times Notable Book of 2011 and New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * * A New Yorker, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year * New poetry by the award-winning poet Tracy K. Smith, whose "lyric brilliance and political impulses never falter" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) You lie there kicking like a baby, waiting for God himself To lift you past the rungs of your crib. What Would your life say if it could talk? —from "No Fly Zone" With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. In these brilliant new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like "love" and "illness" now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. With this remarkable third collection, Smith establishes herself among the best poets of her generation.
Download or read book Liturgy of the Ordinary written by Tish Harrison Warren and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Framed around one ordinary day, this book explores daily life through the lens of liturgy, small practices, and habits that form us. Each chapter looks at something author Tish Harrison Warren does in a day—making the bed, brushing her teeth, losing her keys—and relates it to spiritual practice as well as to our Sunday worship.
Download or read book Ordinary written by Tony Merida and published by B&H Publishing Group. This book was released on 2015 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ordinary is not a call to be more radical. If anything, it is a call to the contrary. The kingdom of God isn’t coming with light shows, and shock and awe, but with lowly acts of service. Tony Merida wants to push back against sensationalism and “rock star Christianity,” and help people understand that they can make a powerful impact by practicing ordinary Christianity.
