River Electric with Light

Sarah Wetzel, poet and engineer, is the author of Bathsheba Transatlantic, winner of the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. She holds an engineering degree from Georgia Tech and MBA from Berkeley. More importantly for her poetry, Sarah completed a MFA in Creative Writing at Bennington College in January 2009. Dividing time between Tel Aviv, Rome, and Manhattan, Sarah currently teaches literature at The American University of Rome. Samples of her writings can be found in many journals as well as www.sarahwetzel.com. Sarah Wetzel, poet and engineer, is the author of Bathsheba Transatlantic, winner of the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. She holds an engineering degree from Georgia Tech and MBA from Berkeley. More importantly for her poetry, Sarah completed a MFA in Creative Writing at Bennington College in January 2009. Dividing time between Tel Aviv, Rome, and Manhattan, Sarah currently teaches literature at The American University of Rome. Samples of her writings can be found in many journals as well as www.sarahwetzel.com.

“This collection is enigmatic, transversive, transformative. There is a movement within its pages—between sections and poems, between concepts and experiences—that is reminiscent of the Italian notion of attraversiamo; crossing over, moving on, getting to another place. . . . [it] is electric with a brilliant lyricism that pulls the reader like a current through shifting locales, political commentary, and mindful meditations on religion, relationship, life and death. A lyricism so stunning that a respected poet recently observed, 'I’d like to write fifty books just so I could use a different line from each of [these] poems as the epigraph.' Always in motion and always multifaceted, the poems in River Electric With Light remind us that 'Our lives are always half over,' but 'There’s still time.'”—Diode Poetry Review "Take yourself on a spiritual pilgrimage with Sarah Wetzel in her recent collection River Electric with Light, through which she accompanies readers to the far flung reaches of Kabul, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Rome, and New York City, exploring the violent and the sacred, the beautiful and the heart-wrenching. Wetzel is a woman simultaneously at home and away in these poems, navigating the landscape of being a partner and caretaker, with being a woman on the road—an emotional landscape as complex as the physical geography she traverses."—Bustle, "13 Poetry Collections To Read For National Poetry Month"—