Two Poems:
"Manhattan Triptych"
"Sakura Park"
from Rachel Wetzsteon's
Sakura Park

Rachel Wetzsteon:

Rachel Wetzsteon is the author of two previous poetry collections, The Other Stars and Home and Away, and a book of criticism about W. H. Auden, Influential Ghosts: A Study of Auden's Sources. Her poems regularly appear in leading magazines and journals, among them The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, Raritan, Salmagundi, and The Yale Review. In 2001, Wetzsteon was the recipient of the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches at William Paterson University in New Jersey and the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, and lives near Sakura Park in New York City's Morningside Heights. (Photo © David Savatteri)

About Sakura Park:

“Rachel Wetzsteon’s poems are so smart, brave, human, and elegantly turned that it’s hard to resist quoting one after another. She has made Manhattan her beat, the New York of the single girl-woman, flaneuse, heartbreak survivor, smoker, wit, and bookworm. She pours these moods and situations so deftly through so wide a range of forms that one hardly notices the bravura craft. One feels, instead, the heart pulsing.”
— Rosanna Warren

“As in her earlier books, Rachel Wetzsteon writes with a quick-witted discernment, a searching vigilance, and a formal virtuosity. But Sakura Park has a new depth and amplitude. It is a large-hearted, full-throated gathering of poems, each a rare glimpse into a sensibility as feathered and sharp as an arrow, an imagination as taut and true as a bowstring. Wetzsteon is a poet no smart reader can afford to miss.”
— J. D. McClatchy

“These lively, sophisticated poems delight with their witty longing, romantic rue, urban chagrin, formal playfulness, and the promise of pleasures that will come ‘in good time.’”
— Phillip Lopate

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