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.

Author City: New York, NY USA

Michael Blumenthal holds the Darden Distinguished Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University. He is author of Dusty Angel (BOA, 1999), which won the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, as well as four other poetry books, one novel, one memoir, an essay collection, and translations of poems by Peter Kantor. Publications include The New Yorker, and Paris Review.