Sarah Wetzel's stunning second collection of poems, River Electric with Light, is a work of pilgrimage, a work in search of the sacred and the spiritually significant. Touching down in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Kabul, New York, and Rome, Wetzel's poems, ranging from lyric meditations to discursive drama, weave themselves from her life as wife
Sarah Wetzel's stunning second collection of poems, River Electric with Light, is a work of pilgrimage, a work in search of the sacred and the spiritually significant. Touching down in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Kabul, New York, and Rome, Wetzel's poems, ranging from lyric meditations to discursive drama, weave themselves from her life as wife, lover, stepmother, and traveler. She names the force propelling her River—"If I must choose a word for you, / let it be the word / for what flows," she writes. At times joyful, at times grief-ridden, Wetzel's poems accumulate associatively pulling slivers of secular solace from a world where violence infuses the body, the landscape, and even dreams, recognizing that while: "Our lives are always half over. / There's still time."
"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"
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