Moonrise Press Announces the Publication of The Desert Hat by Ed Rosenthal, Poet-Broker who Survived Six Days in the Mojave Desert
This collection of poems by Moonrise Press is a unique examination of survival experiences in California Desert before, during and after the lost hikers ordeal.
- (1888PressRelease) October 12, 2013 - Los Angeles, CA - Moonrise Press is pleased to announce the publication of a volume of poetry inspired by a six-and-a-half-day ordeal of Ed Rosenthal, a Poet-Broker, who survived alone after being lost in the Mojave Desert in September 2010. An experienced hiker, he unexpectedly veered far away from his usual route and could not find his way back. While in Salvation Canyon, he was several times missed by search-and-rescue aircraft and helicopters, and finally, miraculously, was found by San Bernardino County Sheriff's Deputies. The wry, surreal, and reflective poems in The Desert Hat: Survival Poems describe the spiritual trajectory of a survivor living through a close encounter with death, starting from alienation in a corporate urban environment and ending with the post-trauma reflections about life and natural environment.
The book consists of 36 poems organized in four sections, reflecting the distinct stages in the spiritual and personal journey, from getting off track, through searching for a way back, through hallucinations in a hostile desert environment, finding shelter in the shade of Salvation Canyon, to being rescued and experiencing the world after the return from the brink of death. The title alludes to a canvas hat that Rosenthal used as a notebook and helped the lost poet control his thoughts, capture emotions, and write down his last will and a farewell to his wife and daughter. The 12 illustrations include photos of the famous hat. This is Ed Rosenthal's first book-length publication.
Paperback print edition: ISBN 978-0-9819693-7-4,74 pages.
E-Book, ISBN 978-0-9819693-9-8
FUTURE READINGS
Sunday, November 10, 2013 Featured Poet at Beyond Baroque
Beyond Baroque Literary Center, Venice, 681 Venice Blvd.
Sunday, November 24, 2013 Featured Poet at Village Poets Monthly Reading
Bolton Hall Museum, 10110 Commerce Avenue, Tujunga, CA 91042.
For more information visit: www.moonrisepress.com or moonrisepress.blogspot.com
ABOUT ED ROSENTHAL
Ed Rosenthal, Poet/Broker of Downtown Los Angeles, was known for using his verses to keep his escrows going. Taking the opposite tact of iconic modernist poets Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot, who kept their day jobs at a seeming distance from their poetry, Poet/Broker employed poetry as a tool in commercial real estate. Rosenthals Poetic Request for 30 day Extension of Contingencies was cited in the Los Angeles Times for enabling a redevelopment project. His Wall Street Journal piece admonished clients in couplets. To place poetic legitimacy on his state-issued real estate licenses, Rosenthal had some signed by world renowned writers, including Seamus Heaney and Evan Boland.
Prior to his near-death experience, he was already bored with the persona of the Poet/Broker. A fan of Federico Garcia Lorca, Rosenthal began to work with poems carrying lunar motifs in urban landscapes. Survival of a harrowing near-death experience in the Mojave Desert in 2010 has deepened this imagistic writers divorce from practicality in the direction of spiritual exploration.
ABOUT THE DESERT HAT
In The Desert Hat, Los Angeles poet/real estate broker Ed Rosenthal presents the mythopoetic journey through his real-life experience of being lost for 6 days in remote canyons of the Mojave Desert's Joshua Tree National Park in September, 2010. The Desert Hat delves deeply into the wildest and unpredictable heart of the Mojave into a storied landscape that Rosenthal renders as both recognizable to the reader and also deeply specific to his solitary and unanticipated experience, and in these poems, creates an empathetic and spiritually-affirming desert landscape that resonates within all of our desert hearts.
~ Ruth Nolan. Professor of English @ College of the Desert, California desert poet, writer, editor,conservationist & scholar
Ed Rosenthals The Desert Hat not only recounts an incredibly vivid story of survival, but maps out the dangerous journeys of the heart and the imagination in that hallucinatory place between mind and body, between nature and man, between the past and the future. Like poet James Wright, Rosenthal goes/ Back to the broken ground of the self and finds a stranger there trapped in the cosmology of an endless, unpitying desert. As the stark sun burns holes/ into the sky the psyches true-north compass finds salvations shade. Rosenthal climbed out of the busted monsters mouth with a beautiful, moving book.
~ Elena Karina Byrne, Executive Director of AVK Arts, author of The Flammable Bird Masque and Squander
The poet-broker Ed Rosenthal was inspired by surviving alone in the Mojave Desert for six and a half days. Rosenthals poetry does not recount his experience in detail; it is not replete with maps, photographs, and a day-by-day account of his adventures. Instead, we gain an insight into what it means to be truly lost and found, to survive the strangest of desert nights and return to the heart of the city… with a newly found wisdom and zest for life.
~ Maja Trochimczyk, Ph.D., President, Moonrise Press; Sr. Director of Planning, Phoenix House; Director, Polish American Historical Association; poet, photographer & music historian
To Book a Reading, Please Contact: Ed Rosenthal: poetbroker ( @ ) yahoo dot com
For Book Inquiries, Please Contact: Dr. Maja Trochimczyk: maja ( @ ) moonrisepress dot com, 818-384-8944
Press Contact:
Maja Trochimczyk
Moonrise Press
Los Angeles, CA
818 394 8944
maja ( @ ) moonrisepress dot com
http://www.moonrisepress.com
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