"[Dungy] writes not as an authority, but as a fellow traveler, reminding us that motherhood will crack open your heart, clutter your brain, confound your steps and explode your consciousness."
"Part memoir, part travelogue, part parental guide, this book is a stunningly beautiful love letter from a mother to her daughter to help her daughter embrace the world she lives in, to introduce her to her ancestors, and prepare her for the future."
"Calm, lucid, and sturdy, Dungy’s account stares down the effects and unevenly distributed burdens of our shared past and present with clear eyes, full heart, and the kind of dedication to fact, feeling, and history that we truly need now, as ever."
"In stirring and insightful prose, the wonder of our shared journey is spelled out on these pages. The music from Camille Dungy’s pen is as intimate as the blues and as epic as a symphony."
"Evokes the blend of horror, mortality, and terrible tenderness [Dungy] has previously captured in her poetry."
"For Dungy, history is a shared root system that nourishes her vital imagination. Guidebook to Relative Strangers is a balm for the American soul."
"Dungy’s voice engages as a conversation with a dear friend might, with affection for the possibilities revealed in human relationships. These gorgeous essays are essential and deeply compelling."
"Motherhood memoirs make up a robust though almost entirely white genre. Camille T. Dungy’s evocative debut . . . meticulously parses the ways in which work, travel and creativity affect black motherhood, and in doing so provides a much needed perspective."
Minneapolis Star Tribune - Anjali Enjeti
"Dungy’s prose is like the landscapes she has known: rich, fertile, astoundingly beautiful, and also singular and exacting. What better a voice to explore the rapture of motherhood, the fraught vulnerability of living in a black body, and the beautiful intimacy that can arise between near strangers? Guidebook to Relative Strangers is world-enlarging and indispensable."
"Some essay collections challenge your intellect, others break open your heart, a few grant a new way of seeing, and occasionally one sings a song you feel in your bones. It’s rare that a collection hits all four notes, yet Camille T. Dungy's first collection of essays. . . does so with impressive range, ambition, and timeliness. . . . May all of us be as fearless and honest in our self-examination as Dungy is here, and may more essays challenge us to become compassionate, wide-awake humans—for ourselves, our children, and the strangers we encounter."
The Rumpus - Cate Hodorowicz
"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… [A]s intimate as it is expansive."
Allyson Johnson narrates the poet Dungy’s lyrical examinations of motherhood, race, history, language, and the natural world with gravity. However, the author’s stories of the delightful antics of her young daughter, Callie, are read with a welcome lightness. As Dungy weaves historical and personal insights into her essays on raising and traveling with Callie, Johnson guides listeners as they meander from remote towns in Maine and Alaska to slave castles in Ghana. Johnson reads with the requisite seriousness as Dungy depicts how traveling as a black woman with a young child seems to invite unending scrutiny, advice, praise, and personal stories from those she meets along the way. Listeners will appreciate Johnson’s use of tone and accents to differentiate these relative strangers. E.E.C. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
2017-04-02
