In her haunting memoir in verse, award-winning author and poet Nikki Grimes shares what she believes is "the most important story" she has to tell: that of her own devastatingly difficult childhood. Though many of her memories were so fractured by trauma that she could glue together only the fragments, the assembly of these shards is in an exquisite collection of linked verses that tells a more real, heartbreakingly beautiful story than any smooth, chronological narrative ever could. Grimes, author of Coretta Scott King Award-winning Bronx Masquerade, as well as Between the Lines, The Watcher, Chasing Freedom and many others, is nakedly honest in Ordinary Hazards about her broken memories: "Author and storyteller,/ I cry out for order,/ logical sequences,/ and smooth transitions./ A modicum of skill/ allows me to create as much--/ in story. But here?/ Where is the chronology of a life/ chaotic from the start?"
Grimes does work within a loosely chronological structure, starting with her birth in 1950 at Harlem Hospital and moving through the years to 1966, when her mother's mental illness escalates and her beloved though mostly absent father dies. During these years, coinciding with the civil rights movement, she and her sister, Carol, pinball between foster homes and stints with their mother and her sexually abusive husband. At three, she and her older sister are locked in a cockroach-infested closet all day, every day, by a woman their mother had hired to watch them, leading to a years-long fear of the dark. ("No one warned me/ the world was full of/ ordinary hazards/ like closets with locks and keys.") The horror of her days relents occasionally when she's in a good foster home, finds a friend or, most significantly, discovers writing at age six. For the first time, she lets her thoughts "gush like a geyser,/ shooting high into the moonless sky."
Ordinary Hazards is a gorgeous piece of writing that also serves as powerful inspiration for any reader who has struggled and sought grace: "the invisible bridge/ spanning the abyss,/ the single light/ that outstrips the dark/ every time." Grimes offers up the details of her young life--often appalling, sometimes wickedly funny--but the undercurrent of hope makes the horror just bearable. Her triumph over adversity is matched only by her skill with the written word. Ordinary Hazards is accessible to poetry enthusiasts and detractors alike, and will linger after the final lines, a response to a favorite teacher's question about what young Nikki wants to do with her life: "I want to write books about/ some of the darkness I've seen,/ real stories about real people, you know?/ But I also want to write about the light,/ because I've seen that, too./ That place of light--it's not always easy/ to get to, but it's there./ It's there." --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor
Shelf Talker: In this stunning YA memoir in verse, Nikki Grimes tells the harrowing story of her childhood, out of which she rose, against all odds, to become an award-winning poet and author.