Rosenthal and Trochimczyk Read "The Desert Hat" and "Slicing the Bread" in CA and NY

"The Voices of Survivors" 

 Maja Trochimczyk & Ed Rosenthal 

at No-Ho Unbuckled Poetry Readings

Saturday June 6, 2015 at 3:45 p.m.

The Unbuckled Poetry readings hosted by Radomir Luza  are held at T/U Studios, at 3:45 p.m. on the First Saturday of each month. 

The T/U. Studios are located at 10943 Camarillo Street (Behind Odyssey Video) (Off Vineland) at the intersection of Vineland, Camarillo and Lankershim. I will co-feature with Ed Rosenthal, author of "The Desert Hat" published by Moonrise Press in 2014 will co-feature at Unbuckled Poetry on June 6, 2015 starting at 3:45 p.m.

Radomir Vojtech Luza wrote the following description of the event: 
"At this time of despair and disjunction, disrepair and malfunction, it is artists that keep the globe spinning and the universe purring. Without these hardy souls, escape and hibernation would be nothing less than impossible and all but implausible. The day to day concerns and worries stripped bare by craftsmen and experts who entertain, educate, illuminate and inspire. It is artists who maintain the balance in a reality gone haywire and a turquoise orb given to tragedy, turmoil and chaos. Whether writers, actors, musicians, comedians, directors, poets, composers, editors or dancers, the fraternity has no end or beginning, merely a middle. And, as such, life changers and existence alterers each one." 

"Therefore, if you wish to encounter and embrace a crew or den of such magnificent muse manipulators, look no further than the monthly UNBUCKLED: NoHo POETRY reading taking place tomorrow, 6/6/15, at T.U. Studios in North Hollywood with Featured Poets Maja Trochimczyk and Ed Rosenthal. 
At four and a half years, UNBUCKLED is the longest running literary series in North Hollywood. It offers life, love, literature and a family atmosphere that changes the world once every 30 or 31 days." 

MAJA TROCHIMCZYK

"If there is a more meticulous, dedicated and passionate poet than Trochimczyk on the Los Angeles poetry scene, this poet has not met him or her. The Polish butterfly publishes, writes, hosts and features in a dizzying schedule that makes her one of the busiest and most sought after poets in the city.

She will be reading from "Slicing the Bread," a chapbook about her parents and their experiences in WWII. If the book is anything like her past work, we have a painstakingly beautiful piece of art to look for ward to. And, really, who would expect anything less from Trochimczyk. This is Maja's first Feature at UNBUCKLED and Mary and I could not be happier to have her."

Maja Trochimczyk with Ed Rosenthal

ED ROSENTHAL

The collection of poetry is THE DESERT HAT by Ed Rosenthal, and Elena Karina Byrne describes it this way: "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/in to 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."
Rosenthal, who survived alone in the Mojave Desert for six and a half days, is a gifted poet who has never read at UNBUCKLED before, but is thrilled and overjoyed to be making his debut tomorrow.
Ed is also courageous and resourceful. The poet-broker overcame tremendous odds that may have humbled others in escaping the desert. 

OPEN MIKE-Open to all poets, writers, actors, musicians and comedians.
Read your own work or that of someone else. It is alright just to watch as well.

The Palace Poetry Group Presents

Slicing the Bread / Krojenie Chleba 

 A Bilingual Poetry Reading 

by Dr. Maja Trochimczyk

TUESDAY, JUNE 9, 2015, 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm.

DeWitt Community Library, DeWitt near Syracuse, NY

3649 Erie Blvd. East, DeWitt, NY 13214
Tel.: (315) 446-3578 www.dewlib.org

Dr. Maja Trochimczyk at Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural, Sylmar, February 2015.

Photo by Jessica Wilson

Slicing the Bread. A Children’s Survival Manual in 25 Poems

 Paperback. Georgetown, KY: Finishing Line Press, 2014, $14 + $2.99 S & H

https://finishinglinepress.com/product_info.php?products_id=2149

Slicing the Bread is a unique poetry collection revisits the dark days of World War II and the post-war occupation of Poland by the Soviet Union that “liberated” the country from one foreign oppression to replace it with another.  The point of view is that of children, raised by survivors, scarred by war, wary of politics. The poems, each inspired by a single object giving rise to memories like Proust’s madeleine (a spoon, a coat, the smell of incense), are divided into three sections, starting with snapshots of World War II in the Polish Borderlands (Kresy) and in central Poland.

Reflections on the Germans’ brutal killings of Jews and Poles are followed by insights into the way the long shadow of THE war darkened a childhood spent behind the Iron Curtain. For poet Georgia Jones Davis, this book, “brings the experience of war into shocking, immediate focus” through Trochimczyk’s use of “her weapon: Language at its most precise and lyrical, understated and piercingly visual.” According to Pulitzer-Prize nominated poet John Guzlowski, Maja’s “poems about what the Poles suffered both during World War II and The Cold War afterwards are written with the clarity of truth and the fullness of poetry… Here are the stories of how the people she loved experienced hunger and suffering and terror so strong that it defined them and taught her, and teach us, the meaning of family.

Ed Rosenthal - Featured Poet at the Cobalt Cafe, July 22 at 8 pm

Poet- broker and the author of "Desert Hat"  Ed Rosenthal will be featured at the Cobalt Cafe on July 22, 2014, at 8:00 p.m.  The Cafe is located at: 22047 Sherman Way, Canoga Park, CA 91303. Cross street: Topanga Canyon Road (halfway between 101 and 118, the Cafe is to the West of Topanga Canyon Rd)

Ed will read from the "Desert Hat" and a broadside with one of his poems will be available for purchase.  "The Desert Hat" -  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. He found refuge in Salvation Canyon, was several times missed by search-and-rescue aircraft and helicopters, and finally, miraculously was found by San Bernardino County Sheriff's Deputies.

To read more about this book visit: http://moonrisepress.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-hat-in-desert-hat-by-ed-rosenthal.html. To purchase your copy of the book visit: http://www.lulu.com/shop/ed-rosenthal/the-desert-hat/paperback/product-21238943.html 

The weekly reading series at the Cobalt Cafe in Canoga Park, California, hosted since 1994 by Los Angeles poet Rick Lupert. Come by any Tuesday night. The Cobalt opens at 7:30 pm on Tuesdays. The reading starts at 8:00 pm. Sign up for the open reading before 9:00 pm. One drink minimum. (Sodas, bottled water, chips and candy. No Alcohol.) 7 minutes maximum at the microphone. All ages. No content restrictions.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/103686959678211/

News about The Desert Hat by Ed Rosenthal

Forthcoming in October 2013 is the wonderful new book by Ed Rosenthal, The Desert Hat. In the words found on the Inlandia Institute's blog, and written by Ruth Nolan, Professor at College of the Desert, and California desert expert, poet, writer, and lover:

 "The story of Rosenthal’s disappearance, and survival, after six days alone in the desert’s harsh September climate was a story a story that riveted Southern California’s attention – as well as the rest of the nation’s – in headlining newspaper and news stories. Like so many others, I anxiously followed the story of his disappearance and the efforts of searchers to find him before it was too late. In addition, as a lifelong, avid back-country Mojave Desert hiker and resident, I was all too aware of the many dangers he faced, especially from exposure and heat. I remember feeling incredibly relieved, and to be honest, surprised, that he had been found alive.

 The story of how Rosenthal was lost, and found, in critical condition but alive, and soon on his way towards making a full recovery, is also a cathartic and transformational one, as rendered here in Desert Hat: Survival Poems in his own words. “The least I could do, after an experience like this, is write a decent book of poems,” he says. Desert Hat: Survival Poems is a unique desert book, even in a body of desert literature filled with life and death stories of those who have faced the southwestern desert’s hostilities.

Stories of getting lost, and barely surviving, are staples of the literature of this remotest and most little known of landscapes. For example, William Lewis Manly’s famous book Death Valley in ’49, which depicts the near-death experience of a party of pioneers who took a wrong turn and barely survived their desert crossing, to the heartbreaking short chapter in Edward Abbey’s celebrated memoir Desert Solitaire, which provides an intimate portrayal of the author’s near-death experience after barely escaping a slot canyon he got trapped in after taking a wrong turn while on a solitary hike.

 Like these other desert books, Rosenthal’s poetry collection is an entry into another world, into a heightened world of self-reflection, of profound revelations, and spiritual enlightenment; his Mojave is a desert world personified and transformed into a universal place. Of the canyon walls he found himself surrounded by, he writes, “Those were friends/Stuck in quartz embraces/Veins of orange eyes smiled.” As he wandered and searched for his car, the desert landscape transformed into a place most extraordinary, leaving an indelible impression, as rendered in another poem: “Ten miles after that turn/The sky was making magic./Turning limbs to ghostly signs/Making a prickly pear look/Like a red shirted hiker.

 These poems are the reader’s entry into the “other world” the author himself entered from the moment on a September day when he realized he was lost. In these highly imagistic poems, we are lead along on this most unusual of journeys, which is both a literal and mythopoetic one that can only be rendered by the Mojave’s mystical and labyrinthine landscape and through Rosenthal’s growing self-awareness and deepening connections with the intimacies of the desert’s private nuances, as seen through his eyes and experienced in his imagination during the time he was lost."

Ed Rosenthal (a couple of years earlier)

 Reprinted from Inlandia Institute's blog: http://localauthors.pe.com/uncategorized/the-desert-hat-survival-poems-a-true-story-of-being-lost-and-found-in-joshua-tree/

The foreward to Ed Rosenthal's new book of poetry inspired by his misadventure in the Mojave Desert, was written by Ruth Nolan, Professor of English @ College of the Desert, California desert poet, writer, editor, conservationist & scholar. Ruth is the editor of No Place for a Puritan: the literature of CA's deserts (Heyday 2009), a critically acclaimed anthology. She is also an active member of desert conservation groups, and the literary force in the landscape of the desert. Her writings are on her blog, http://ruthnolan.blogspot.com