The Light Of The World (Thorndike Press large print biographies and memoirs) - Hardcover

Alexander, Elizabeth

4.1

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9781410482228: The Light Of The World (Thorndike Press large print biographies and memoirs)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1410482227 ISBN 13: 9781410482228

Publisher: Thorndike Press, 2015

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The acclaimed poet reflects with gratitude on her life after the sudden death of her husband, discussing her personal quest for meaning and understanding, her renewed devotion to her teenage sons, and meditating on the blessings of love and family.

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Review:

An Amazon Best Book of April 2015: Elizabeth Alexander’s memoir of her marriage and the sudden death of her husband is by turns sorrowful and joyful, earthy and elegiac, deeply personal and achingly universal. Alexander, an acclaimed poet perhaps best known for the poem she delivered at Barack Obama’s first inauguration, is a professor at Yale. (In an aside, she reveals that she is only the 3rd African American woman to get tenure at that University.) Her husband, Ficre, was an Eritrean who’d survived civil war in Africa to become a chef and artist in America; their marriage, as chronicled here, was a triumph of politics, society and romance. It was not without its secrets or its difficulties, but it was clearly a happy, no, make that a joyful union; the pleasures of cooking together (Alexander sometimes includes recipes), entertaining a huge, international group of family and friends and raising their two precocious boys is palpable on every mellifluous page. Like Joan Didion, Meghan O’Rourke and Roger Rosenblatt before her, Alexander here faces the unfaceable topic of loss -- and almost convinces us – and herself – that despite her terrible grief, she is grateful for the life and love that preceded it. --Sara Nelson

About the Author:

Elizabeth Alexander composed and recited "Praise Song for the Day" for President Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration. She is the author of six books of poetry--including American Sublime, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize--and is the first winner of the Jackson Prize for Poetry and a National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellow. She is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University.

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