Sarah Wetzel

Sarah Wetzel is a poet, essayist, and engineer. She grew up a daughter of the American South, but somehow ended up in Israel after job-hopping across the Americas and Europe. Sarah graduated with an engineering degree from Georgia Tech and received a MBA from The University of California, Berkeley. Despite both, Sarah completed a MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College in January 2009. She currently divides time between New York City and Israel. Her manuscript Bathsheba Transatlantic was selected by contest judge Garrett Hongo as winner of the 2009 Levine Prize in Poetry.

BATHSHEBA TRANSATLANTIC
BY SARAH WETZEL
$17.00. (email us for availability)

Sarah Wetzel, winner of the 2009 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. "BATHSHEBA TRANSATLANTIC is a fascinating testimony from someone who's lived in modern Israel, the real physical dangers of that life, and, throughout, the awareness of an historical inheritance of travail and faith. The poems are written sparely, but with intensely compassionate emotions—for Israelis and Palestinians both—and the bitter skill of reflection. A compelling journey through a maze of mortal dangers, a global controversy brought down to the level of a daily life conducted in almost constant spiritual suffering, with the Minotaur of anguished moral conflict at the center. A necessary book for our time"—Garrett Hongo.

Sarah Wetzel shuttles between two worlds, mapping out a terrain where settlements have begun to sprout up on both sides of the Atlantic, where a sense of homeland remains elusive. She is in-between: transient, itinerant, her quest for a sense of belonging ongoing as she cycles through her many lyrical selves. This dialogue between the Middle East and Manhattan, between a Bathsheba depicted by Rembrandt on the one hand and mythologized by the Old Testament on the other, captures the tension and struggle of a woman seeking to reinvent herself in her own image both in life and in art. A tremendous debut. -- Tim Liu, Bending the Mind Around the Dream’s Blown Fuse

In language that is both untried and probing, Sarah Wetzel dares to confront the devastating personal and public questions that paralyze nations, writers, and artists -- the most important: where is the moral line that governs "we who carry nothing suspicious," those of us not on the battlefields, but who participate nonetheless in the silent heat and brutality of conflict? Yet Bathsheba Transatlantic also tends to the personal wounds of self-exile, desire, and longing; and maybe it is this which most animates Wetzel's imagination, a poetry that avoids mere ethnography of the unconscious to take a bold survey of the heart. -- Major Jackson, Holding Company