The Light of the World

March 23, 2015
Poet and Yale African Studies professor Alexander (The Black Interior; Power and Possibility) was devastated by the death of her artist husband, who died of cardiac arrest at age 50 while exercising in the basement of their home. This memoir is an elegiac narrative of the man she loved. Artist and chef Ficre Ghebreyesus’s death was as inexplicable as the spark of love between him and Alexander after they met at a New Haven café in 1996. Ghebreyesus was a thin, fit person who nonetheless smoked; and he was not without his mysteries. For example, in the days before his death, he was obsessed with buying lottery tickets. Ghebreyesus was a gentle, peace-loving East African who had come through the Eritrean-Ethiopian civil war and was a refugee in America; he became a fashionable painter and an inventive chef at Caffe Adulis, which he ran in New Haven with his brothers. Alexander, who grew up in Washington, D.C., describes her husband’s endearing traits such as sleep-talking or singing in his native Tigrinya, and the special rituals he made when their sons reached age 13. Fashioning her mellifluous narrative around the beauty she found in Ghebreyesus, Alexander is grateful, patient, and willing to pursue a fit of magical thinking that he might just return.

January 1, 2015
A distinguished poet meditates on the early death of her beloved artist husband.A Brooklyn psychic once told Alexander (Literature and Culture/Yale Univ.; Praise Song for the Day, 2009, etc.) that she would meet a mate sooner than she realized. What the psychic did not say was that Eritrean-born Ficre Ghebreyesus would bring her a love and fulfillment that transcended anything she had ever known. Though hailing from different worlds-Alexander from Harlem and Ficre from East Africa-the two blended their lives to create a kind of trans-Atlantic "karmic balance." Alexander firmly grounded the husband who had seen war and poverty in his nation, and Ficre gave his American wife an abundance of family while connecting her to a history of black warriors who had never known slavery. Together, they built and inhabited an extraordinarily colorful, multicultural space made of books, art, food and friends. But then, 15 years into their marriage and just four days after his 50th birthday, an outwardly robust Ficre died of a heart attack. Now a widow with two teenage sons, Alexander began the lengthy, often wrenching process of mourning the man who had been the "light of [her] world." With tenderness and fierce poetic precision, Alexander recalls the hours, days, months and years after her husband's death. Grief-stricken to the point she could not produce the poetry she loved, the author marked the passage of time by observing whether she or her children still cried over his passing. At the same time, she celebrates how the love she and Ficre shared helped heal "every old wound with magic disappearing powers" so that the descendant of slaves and the survivor of a tragic war could go on with their lives. In letting go of-but never forgetting-her husband, Alexander realizes a simple truth: that death only deepens the richness of a life journey that must push on into the future. A delicate, existentially elegiac memoir.

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Starred review from March 15, 2015
Poet Alexander (Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems, 19902010, 2010) tells us at the outset that this memoir about the sudden death of her husband is not a tragedy but rather a love story. Professor of African American studies at Yale and author of The Black Interior (2004), an essay collection about African American art, Alexander gained global visibility when she presented her poem, Praise Song for the Day, at President Obama's first inauguration. Now in this exquisitely distilled remembrance, she recounts her marriage to exuberantly creative Ficre Ghebreyesus, a painter, chef, gardener, and passionate reader. After growing up in war-torn Eritrea in East Africa, he eventually made his way to New Haven, Connecticut, where he and Alexander experienced lightning-strike love at first sight. As Alexander describes, with spellbinding grace, their vital bond, devotion to beauty, and joy in their two sons, her wonder and gratitude for their time together rise up from the page like the scent of the flowers Ghebreyesus planted for her, the brightness of the colors he loved, and the music of their family conversations. Alexander also writes with thoughtful candor of the shock of her husband's sudden death, the fog of grief, her spiritual dilemmas, and her gradual emergence back into the light. A radiant book of love's everlastingness and art's infinite sustenance.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

November 15, 2014

Expect truth and beauty in this heartrending memoir from poet Alexander, a Pulitzer Prize finalist who recited her "Praise Song for the Day" at President Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration. Here, after her husband's sudden death at 49, she reflects on their life together and the process of raising her sons alone. With a 40,000-copy first printing; look for a New Yorker serial.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2015

Alexander's marriage to her husband, Ficre, was a great love, one filled with his painting, her poetry, their cooking, and an extended family all over the world. When Ficre dies suddenly, the life she has built with him and their two sons in New Haven, CT, seems to disintegrate. This gorgeous, shimmering account from a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry is an homage to the 15-year partnership the author and her husband shared. Though Alexander's story is deeply personal, readers who have experienced love and loss will relate to it easily. VERDICT While it's impossible to avoid comparisons to Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, this work is set apart by the fluid translation of Alexander's poetic ability into sentences so beautiful they beg to be reread. [See Memoir, 2/18/15; ow.ly/MBCgC.]--Erin Shea (ES)

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.