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Natalie Vanderbilt’s The Most Secret Window is a tour de force. She creates an evocative world that enriches a reader’s existence beyond measure.
Few stories come to us with such exquisite, tormenting balance. That is what this epic poem is all about: balancing passions and ambition.
When one opens oneself to love, one surrenders the requirements of old paradigms and becomes a new person. That new being does not fit in an emotional straitjacket or war zone.
Her lips pressed to his and stirred to life
An unforgiving and painful passion.
They had done the forbidden in earthly life,
They had found one another with thought.
Instead of body to body, the human strife,
They'd done something they'd never been taught.
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. There is an elusive urgency in human emotion that few writers are really successful in fully recognizing and bringing to life in poems. Vanderbilt is one of the few. In this epic tale she creates a compassionate, passionate alternative to a world that too often dozes in dreamless sleep.
The universe is smaller
Than the love
That flows between us.
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