Bathsheba Transatlantic

Bathsheba Transatlantic “dwells between continents and identities.”

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"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, The Mirror Diary

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

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

Here’s what a reviewer had to say…

In language evocative and vivid, Wetzel, selected winner of the Levine Prize in Poetry by judge Garrett Hongo, transports her readers to Israel in her first collection. As the title suggests, she dwells between continents and identities. Her snapshots of time and place coalesce into complex portraits, capturing the growth and discovery that occur in spaces between. Wetzel is in conversation with the past as she navigates present-day Israel, invoking Plato, Moses, and David to decipher modern-day dilemmas. Her keen insights are defined by her wide-eyed otherness, and she holds a microscope to the minutiae of everyday life in the way only an outsider can, whether in a close-up of a polygamist gardener or mulling her love-hate relationship with Tel Aviv. Wetzel’s work reveals itself slowly, even gracefully, and she effortlessly spins the particular into the universal. Some of her poems read like exhales—the release of tension through text—and give breath to a poet pondering her identity on the page. — Alizah Salario (from Booklist)