The Light of the World is a memoir that Elizabeth has written with rare elegance in which she reminisces about her marriage, her grief, and how her art helped her transform her loss into a gorgeous treatise of love. Her poet’s aesthetics shine incandescent in passage after passage that is nothing short of a miracle. “What if the mightiest word is love?” Elizabeth challenges in the poem that she recited at the Presidential inauguration. We now know that in their short life together, this indeed was the case; from the “visceral torque” that she felt the first time that she saw her husband Ficre, to that final moment when she tried to breathe life into his already dead body minutes after he fell on the treadmill exercising in the home gymnasium barely four days after he turned fifty. Their life together was touched by extraordinary love. Ficre was born into a large family in war-ravaged Eritrea from where he fled to Sudan, then to Europe, before he found his way to the US. He ...
India's Number 1 Book Review Website