This Book

I came across The Light of the World through something else I recently read. I don't remember what. Not from the women authors of color list, although the author, Elizabeth Alexander, poet and professor of African American Studies at Yale, is an author of color. Not from a magazine article. Not from Black Ink. From someone else's mention of the work?

I don't know.

But I do know this: reading this book was like holding a glowing, translucent orb in my hands.

Alexander's memoir is about the sudden death of her husband, painter Ficre Ghebreyesus, days after his 50th birthday. She writes flowingly, forwards and backwards, painting in words as he surely painted on canvas. Alexander seamlessly captures their marriage, their respective childhoods and lives before meeting, their sons, his death, their love for one another and for their sons, the loss she feels as wife, the loss her sons feel—Alexander write of it all, and of the love and the wonder at that love threaded through every bit of it.

Every now and then. you are blessed as a reader with a book that reaches deep into your heart and lodges there. This book is one of those for me.