This spring, during National Poetry Month (April) and the weeks immediately before and after, publishers are pushing out a host of memoirs by poets. We’ve rounded up three here, in which celebrated poets, including a Pulitzer Prize winner, chronicle everything from childbirth, motherhood, race, and identity, to death and grief.
Ordinary Light
Tracy K. Smith
Knopf
Pages: 368
Pub Date: Mar. 31
Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Smith “reaches around the deep Christian piety of her Alabama-born mother to the author’s own questions about faith and her black identity” in this new work, according to PW’s review. The book covers, per the publisher, Smith’s childhood in suburban California, her time at Harvard, and her “Alabama-born parents’ recollections of their own youth in the civil rights era.”
The Light of the World
Elizabeth Alexander
Grand Central
Pages: 224
Pub Date: Apr. 21
This is the first book-length work of prose by Alexander, who has six books of poetry to her name—including American Sublime, which was shortlisted for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize. In the book, Alexander reflects on her marriage after the sudden death of her husband in 2011, “grappling with the subsequent void, and feeling a reenergized devotion to her two teenage sons.”
The Argonauts
Maggie Nelson
Graywolf Press
Pages: 160
Pub Date: May 5
In PW’s starred review, we write that poet and author Nelson “plows ahead with a disarmingly blushing work about trying to simultaneously embrace her identity, her marriage with nomadic transgender filmmaker Harry, and motherhood.” Graywolf describes Nelson’s writing as in the spirit of Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, calling the work an exploration of how thinkers and theorists have tried to “untie the vexing knots” that limit the way we talk about “gender and the domestic institutions of marriage and childbirth.”
