Guidebook to Relative Strangers, Camille T. Dungy
Guidebook to Relative Strangers, Camille T. Dungy
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Guidebook to Relative Strangers
Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History

Author: Camille T. Dungy

Narrator: Allyson Johnson

Unabridged: 6 hr 24 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/23/2017


Synopsis

As a working mother whose livelihood as a poet-lecturer depended on travel, Camille T. Dungy crisscrossed America with her infant, then a toddler. As they travel, Dungy is intensely aware of how they are seen, not just as mother and child but as black females. With a poet's eye, she celebrates the particular in the universal, such as a child's acquisition of language and what to pack in a diaper bag. At the same time, her horizons are wide, as history shadows her steps everywhere she goes: from the San Francisco of settlers' and investors' dreams to the slave-trading ports of Ghana; from snow-white Maine to a festive, yet threatening, bonfire in the Virginia pinewoods.

With exceptional candor, Dungy explores our inner and outer worlds—the multitudinous experiences of mothering, illness, and the ever-present embodiment of race—finding fear and trauma but also mercy, kindness, and community. Penetrating and generous, far-seeing and intimate, her prose is an essential guide for a troubled land.

About Camille T. Dungy

Camille T. Dungy is an award winning poet and editor and a professor of creative writing at Colorado State University. She lives with her husband and child in Fort Collins.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Roxane

With Guidebook to Relative Strangers, Camille Dungy has crafted an elegant, meditative love letter to the life of the writer, the natural world, histories from which we cannot nor should not extricate ourselves, black womanhood, black motherhood, and the unabashed joy of raising up a black girl. Fro......more

Goodreads review by Kerry

This book was magnificent. Familiar, eye-opening, so beautifully written, and rich with wisdom and ideas. Reminded me of Rebecca Solnit, Leslie Jamison, Joan Didion, but also very much itself and incredible for it. READ THIS BOOK.......more

I like her writing style, but she's very obsessed with mothering her young daughter, and while that is meaningful and useful both for her and some readers, I wanted her to expand outward more. Maybe in her next book?......more

Goodreads review by Jaime

This is my first time reading Dungy and it won’t be the last, that’s for sure.......more

Goodreads review by Rachel

I loved this book. As soon as I started reading it, I was enchanted. I forgot I was standing in a bookstore reading a book, and that never happens to me. I love the writing, the genre-bending combination of essay and memoir, and her insightful perspective.......more