River Electric with Light, winner of the 2012 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize.
Judge: Tracy K. Smith
Buy this Book“Sarah Wetzel’s River Electric with Light is 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, her poems accumulate associatively, riven together by a common quest. Wetzel’s worship is, like her worship of rivers, the worship of the continuing.” Publisher, Red Hen Press
Like the river of the collection’s title, these poems ride upon a current of arduous insight and indelible imagery. And, like all courageous writing does, they make their own particular peace with the likelihood that even our most insistent questions—about love and human cruelty and belief—will never be adequately answered.
—Tracy K. Smith
