Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

Rachel Wetzsteon, a talented poet with critical acclaim for works that often juxtapose the love lives of women with the urban setting of the Upper West Side, died around Christmas Day at 42.  Wetzsteon was found in her Morningside Heights apartment last week after an apparent suicide.  Her work has been praised for turning “Morningside Heights—a quiet, bourgeois neighborhood near Columbia University… into a theater of romance, an intellectual haven, a flaneur’s paradise. Her poems evoke the kind of life that generations of young people have come to New York to live—earnest, glamorous, and passionate, full of sex and articulate suffering.”  Wetzsteon’s insight into the neighborhood, telling stories that help remind readers of the area’s beauty and romanticism, are part of the reason that she is often called “one of the best poets of her generation.”  Ms. Wetzsteon received a bachelor’s degree from Yale, a master’s from Johns Hopkins and a Ph.D. from Columbia. She is survived by her mother, Sonja Frenkel, and her stepmother, Laura Ross. [Source: Tablet, New York Times]

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