Days We Would Rather Know. This item is unavailable.Days We Would Rather Know

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.

Michael Blumenthal is the author, most recently, of the memoir All My Mothers and Fathers (Harper Collins, 2002), and of Dusty Angel (BOA Editions, 1999), his sixth book of poems. His novel Weinstock Among the Dying, which won Hadassah Magazine's Harold U. Ribelow Prize for the best work of Jewish fiction in l994, and his collection of essays from Central Europe, When History Enters the House, was published in l998. He has lived at taught at universities in Hungary, Israel, Germany and France, mostly as a Fulbright Fellow. In 2004-2005, he holds the Acuff Chair of Excellence in the Creative Arts at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee. He spends his summers in a small village near the shores of Lake Balaton in Hungary.