Moonrise Press Releases 'The Desert Hat' by Ed Rosenthal

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: 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.

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. 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.

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 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, author of The Flammable Bird Masque and Squander

To Book a Reading, Please Contact: Ed Rosenthal: poetbroker@yahoo.com

For Book Inquiries, Please Contact:
Dr. Maja Trochimczyk
maja@moonrisepress.com
818-384-8944

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