FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Geneva Whitney

Tel: 303-738-2167

email: randomriverpress@qwest.net

Author’s Site: www.natalievanderbilt.com

When Poetry becomes a Weapon

Some say that poetry is dead, resigned to the small tent inhabited by other poets. How do you break out of that incestuous circle and get the mainstream to read poetry? You write it as a weapon that others can use, with page turning verse, instead of as a therapy of self-expression. Most published poetry sounds pretty much the same, but this is not that same animal.

Robert McDowell, the editor of Poetry After Modernism and Cowboy Poetry Matters, and founding publisher and editor of Story Line Press, says that Natalie Vanderbilt’s The Most Secret Window is a tour de force. He first encountered this remarkable project in a workshop at the Taos Writers Conference and quickly realized that he was reading something out of the ordinary. Its American precursors are Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Edwin Arlington Robinson, the contemporary epics of Frederick Pollack, and David Mason, and the Irish dramas of W. B. Yeats.

Like all of these ancestors, Vanderbilt creates an evocative world that enriches a reader’s existence beyond measure. The receptive reader will find her perception of time and passion forever changed. As Yeats memorably wrote, “A terrible beauty is born.”

In The Most Secret Window, the hero’s conflict is itself epic, exhilarating and tragic in its many scenes and acts, and his love, despite the ethereal fact of her presence, becomes somehow more real to us than all of the other very real characters in the story. Though Vanderbilt's zest for jarring, brutal action scenes periodically shocks us, though the San Francisco she paints is weirdly fascinating, it is the lovers themselves who compel us to read on. This epic tale creates a compassionate, passionate alternative to a world that too often dozes in dreamless sleep.