Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History

In this candid and graceful essay collection, acclaimed poet Camille T. Dungy offers 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 (Roxane Gay). As a working mother and poet-lecturer whose livelihood depended on travel, Dungy crisscrossed America and beyond, navigating our troubled landscape with her young daughter in tow, intensely aware of how they are perceived. 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, Dungy finds fear and trauma, and also mercy, kindness, and community. Penetrating and generous, Guidebook to Relative Strangers remind[s] us that motherhood will crack open your heart, clutter your brain, confound your steps and explode your consciousness (Mutha Magazine).