Much of this book, however, is a celebration of his life rather than a meditation on his death. She remembers him as sure yet shy, courtly and curious, trim and of medium build with bright white teeth and a shaven head which looked like "a chestnut, topaz or buckwheat honey".
He would lay out hot treats for late-arriving friends in the wee hours and buy and stash stacks of lottery tickets in the many books he read because he wanted so much to win the lottery for her.
For a long time after he dies, she cannot bring herself to enter bookshops because he was "the ghost of all bookstores", spending hours among their shelves reading anything from the Khmer Rouge to gardening to what causes sinkholes.
Thus is the blessing that was her husband, whose first name Ficre means love, also her burden today. He died almost as suddenly as they wed, with her cheeks "burning with our secret" of their first child already "quickening" within her.
Days before Ghebreyesus' death, they watched, frozen, as a hawk ripped a squirrel apart. He then told her that he had seen that same hawk ravage another rodent the day before. In hindsight, she muses, it was an omen of doom.
This book is now a US bestseller, which is surprising for one as modestly known as Alexander. But it is not hard to see why, seeing as what she writes is so exacting, deep and true.
In fact, she never set out to pen prose about her late husband.
As she told National Public Radio's Michele Norris in August: "When I sat down to write, I didn't sit down to write this. I simply wrote as an extension of my hand, as an extension of my body trying to stay absolutely grounded in my hand on a table, with my feet on the ground, planted on an Earth that had so suddenly seemed unstable."
As she quotes from German poet Rainer Maria Rilke's The Book Of Hours: "Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror/Just keep going. No feeling is final/Don't let yourself lose me."
Eventually, Alexander and her sons have to leave their picture-perfect home in New Haven, where Ghebreyesus died while running on the treadmill, and resettle in New York City, where she was born.
Towards the close of the book, she muses: "Today, we look out our window at the Hudson River and wait for another hurricane as the sky turns lavender and orange. Ficre colours. When the rain is most dramatic, we feel him close."
You will likely find it hard to hold back your tears as you turn each page and this story of rare love will stick in your craw.
But you would do well to bear the discomfort; this sturdy, heartfelt effort is one of the best books of the year.
Just a minute
The good
1. This first memoir by African-American poet Elizabeth Alexander is elegiac, a thing of quiet beauty. It is made up of essays that do not unfurl chronologically, but in snapshots and snatches of memory as she recalls the sudden death of her beloved husband. Alexander wrote this book in four months, crying through the experience. But as deep and painful as her experiences with loss are, you will want to keep turning the pages of this book and not stop till the end. It takes supreme skill to evoke emotions so deftly and sparingly and, dare I say it, Alexander's prose may well be finer than her verse.
2. Every word will resonate with anyone who has loved and lost deeply. But she is never cloying, perhaps because she resolves to describe happenings as they are, without the glazed tint of nostalgia. In fact, every so often, she splashes cold water in the reader's face with surprising narrative jags, such as how she regarded her husband sexually.
3. She also gives readers enlightening glimpses into an ancient culture, that of the Eritreans of East Africa. Examples abound in this slim volume, from how they brew coffee - painstakingly enough to rival the tea ceremony of Japan - to how they define a homely, faithful man, that is, one who "has drunk his water".
The bad
1. Readers might be forgiven for thinking that her late husband, Ficremariam Ghebreyesus, could do no wrong. While she does not frame him in flattery or platitudes, she should have delved deeper into his darker days and greyer decisions, such as wanting to be a freedom fighter in the 1970s.
The iffy
1. There is not a single picture or photograph in this book, save for Ghebreyesus' painting Solitary Boat In Red And Blue on its cover. Wouldn't most readers want to know what her late, great artist husband looked like?