The Wild Geography of Misplaced Things

David Rosenthal’s The Wild Geography of Misplaced Things takes us beyond the established borders of our ordinary lives into memory and its defiance of time, a place where things that may have been misplaced suddenly reappear and reveal their true nature, until we realize that nothing in Rosenthal’s world that truly matters is misplaced or forgotten… It helps that rhythm seems to come as naturally to him as breathing. It helps that he knows the value of laughter and the dangers of too much restriction… It helps that he has a boundless capacity for tenderness… It helps that his clarity of purpose is never polemical or dogmatic, even when it is hard-hitting… Rosenthal makes the listening as instructive as it is delightful.
Lynne Knight
How lucky David Rosenthal's students are! They have a teacher whose perception of the physical world is as fresh, genuine and immediate as their own, whose language is as bravely, unashamedly direct, and whose desire to play—with words, images, ideas, experiences and things—is apparently as inexhaustible. And they're luckier still in the extras he brings them: the adult capacity to value all of those important and impermanent blessings, the poet's urge to preserve them in poems, and the wisdom to know that nothing else can. Come to think of it, his readers are even luckier—all of them, at any age.
~ Rhina P. Espaillat
David Rosenthal is a very careful poet. I suppose that goes with the territory when one's profession is teaching little children. Like little kids, poems need to be cared for, even curated. Rosenthal sets his carefully chosen words in the silver chains of his lines, and the effect is lapidary. Purchase and read this book.
~ Timothy Murphy