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The Desert Hatby Ed Rosenthal
Published in October 2013, in paperback and e-book formats. BUY IT NOW: ISBN 978-09819693-7-4, paperback, 74 pages, $15.00 BUY IT NOW: ISBN 9780981969398, e-book in e-Pub format, 1.2 MB, $10.00 The “poet-broker” Ed Rosenthal was inspired by surviving alone in the Mojave Desert for six and a half days. The lyrical result of his ordeal, "The Desert Hat," consist of 36 poems illustrated with 12 photographs of his hat and Salvation Canyon where he spent most of his time. Rosenthal’s 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. With an introduction by Ruth Nolan and photos by Maja Trochimczyk, and Ken and Wendy Sims. For more information visit Moonrise Press Blog. |
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Elena Karina Byrne about this Book |
Ed Rosenthal’s 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 psyche’s true-north compass finds salvation’s shade. Rosenthal climbed out of “the busted monster’s mouth” with a beautiful, moving book. ~ Elena Karina Byrne, Executive Director of AVK Arts
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Prof. Ruth Nolan about this Book |
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
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About the Author
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. Rosenthal's "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 writer's divorce from practicality in the direction of spiritual exploration.
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. Rosenthal's "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 writer's divorce from practicality in the direction of spiritual exploration.