A richly textured and moving account of identity and dark family secrets follows the author, who, forced to endure the same fate as his father, embarks on an odyssey of belonging that affects his entire adult existence, and struggles to prevent the problems of the past from affecting his own son's future.

All My Mothers and Fathers: A Memoir

Blumenthal, Michael

Parenting & Relationships

Harper

A richly textured and moving account of identity and dark family secrets follows the author, who, forced to endure the same fate as his father, embarks on an odyssey of belonging that affects his entire adult existence, and struggles to prevent the problems of the past from affecting his own son's future. Reprint.

Harper-perennial

Poetry. Now back in print after more than 20 years, Michael Blumenthal's DAYS WE WOULD RATHER KNOW, originally published by Viking-Penguin and sold out in both of its original printings, was one of the most admired, and most influential, books of American poetry of the 1980's, and marked the auspicious continuation of one of the decade's most promising debuts. While different in scope, subject, and style, these seventy poems all body forth a central theme: that - as reality is dissatisfying and satisfaction elusive - hope is in itself an antidote, and possibility is always invigorating. "Love is rarely as exciting as the wish for love," writes Blumenthal; DAYS WE WOULD RATHER KNOW suggests that we are as fulfilled, as animated, by our longings as by the resolution of those wishes.

Days We Would Rather Know

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Penguin??Books

Poems deal with marriage, modern relationships, language, death, nature, romanticism, love, loneliness, and art

Against Romance (Poets, Penguin)

Michael Blumenthal's Days We Would Rather Know, originally published by Viking-Penguin and sold out in both its original printings, was one of the most admired, and most influential, books of American poetry of the l980s, and marked the auspicious continuation of one of the decade's most promising debuts. Of Michael Blumenthal's first book, Sympathetic Magic, Howard Nemerov said, "The last first book I remember as having this strangeness and distinction was called Harmonium." That comparison to the work of Wallace Stevens was, if anything, more apt in the case of this astonishing second collection, a collection that helped establish Mr. Blumenthal as a master of language in his own right. He worked his brand of magic with unforgettable imagery ("When your wife uttered your son like a large syllable into this world"), a lambent humor ("I wish Robert Rauschenberg would take back his bathtub and his floating goat"), and a playful eroticism ("My mouth puddles with bourbon and the taste of

Days We Would Rather Know: Poems

Viking Adult

Poetry. A reprinted edition of the celebrated 1987 Penguin edition (a collection) by the 1985 winner of the Academy of American Poets Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award. "Blumenthal's new collection moves surely through the contradictions implied by its title. Belonging to the "central" modernist tradition of Wallace Stevens and informed by both wit and intelligence, the poems take us through a variety of topics and moods without losing sight of the book's pivotal experience, a divorce. Urbane, sophisticated, sometimes self-deprecatory, Blumenthal sustains an observant distance, which only emphasizes the romantic yearning underlying the book's theme. The best poems work well, arching toward an ethereal, metaphysical tone, as in these lines from the title poem: "and when life turns its dimmed lights up/ once again and the theater empties,/ they find the stranger love always delivers up." Other poems feel like exercises, but Blumenthal's voice is growing more authentic"--Library Journal.

Against Romance

Literary

The Viking Press

Laps (Juniper Prize for Poetry)

Laps is the winner of the 1984 Juniper Prize, the annual poetry award sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Press. The book is a sequence of poems in 32 sections written in the voice of a swimmer engaged in a half-mile swim. Blumenthal sees swimming as an act of rhythm and purification, of immersion and transformation, of exile, initiation, and return. His poems have an extraordinary combination of brightness and depth. They record a complex pattern of rhythms, a motion somewhere between incantation and prayers, between sport and ritual, between wakefulness and sleep, between our terrestrial life and the aquatic species we evolve from.

University of Massachusetts Press

Laps is the winner of the 1984 Juniper Prize, the annual poetry award sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Press. The book is a sequence of poems in 32 sections written in the voice of a swimmer engaged in a half-mile swim. Blumenthal sees swimming as an act of rhythm and purification, of immersion and transformation, of exile, initiation, and return. His poems have an extraordinary combination of brightness and depth. They record a complex pattern of rhythms, a motion somewhere between incantation and prayers, between sport and ritual, between wakefulness and sleep, between our terrestrial life and the aquatic species we evolve from.

Literary Nonfiction. Nature. Travel. In May of 2007, noted American poet and novelist and son of Holocaust refugees Michael Blumenthal went to South Africa to volunteer at C.A.R.E., a rehabilitation center for orphaned and injured baboons founded by Rita Miljo. Rita was a Lithuanian-born childhood member of the Hitler Youth who had gone on to have a life as adventure- filled as Beryl Markham's in West With the Night.

Because They Needed Me: Rita Miljo and the Orphaned Baboons of South Africa

Biographies & Memoirs

Miljo, Rita

Community & Culture

Aequitas Books

Sympathetic Magic

Water Mark Pr

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Blumenthal, Michael. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Blumenthal, Michael

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Blumenthal, Michael. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

All My Mothers and Fathers: A Memoir

All My Mothers and Fathers: A Memoir

Days We Would Rather Know

Against Romance (Poets, Penguin)

Days We Would Rather Know: Poems

Against Romance

Laps (Juniper Prize for Poetry)

Laps (Juniper Prize for Poetry)

Because They Needed Me: Rita Miljo and the Orphaned Baboons of South Africa

Sympathetic Magic