Michael Blumenthal

"Michael C. Blumenthal was born in 1949 in Vineland, New Jersey. A poet, essayist, novelist, and translator, Blumenthal began his career as a lawyer. He earned his JD from Cornell Law School, and later went on to study clinical psychology at Antioch. Blumenthal once commented: "Like many poets, I came to my vocation, one might say, through the back door, having struggled through years of seemingly desirable yet (to me) unsatisfying jobs, while 'stealing' the time for my true work. The original impetus for my writing, perhaps, was best reflected in a statement made by Robert Mezey-'I am a man, a Piscean, and unhappy, and therefore I make up poems'-but I feel, now, that my work derives from the healthier (and happier) desire to tap the sources of my own inner wisdom, and to make music of it." - Poets and Writers

Shortly after his mother dies of breast cancer when he is ten years old, Michael Blumenthal discovers that she was not his biological mother, and that his aunt and uncle, immigrant chicken farmers living in Vineland, New Jersey, are really his parents.As fate would have it, his adoptive father, a German-Jewish refugee raised by a loveless and embittered stepmother after his own mother died in childbirth, has inflicted on his stepson a fate uncannily - and terrifyingly - similar to his own: Having first adopted Michael, in part, to help his dying wife, he then imposes on him the same sort of penurious and loveless stepmother whom he himself had had to survive. With these revelations, the ""mysteries"" that seem to have permeated Michael's childhood are laid bare, triggering a quest for belonging that will infiltrate the author's entire adult life.

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. "A lot of people have asked me whether they could write 'my book,' Rita wrote to Michael shortly thereafter, "and I said no, because I was envisaging a story both sad and happy, but certainly mixed with a lot of humor. But if you asked me, I would not say no." With that, for the only time in her life, Rita entrusted another human being with thirty years' worth of her journals, and a rare and unusual collaboration was born. Because They Needed Me is that story, a chronicle of primate conservation and the intrepid and courageous woman who devoted her life to it. It is like no other book of its kind.

What's wrong with the contemporary American medical system? What does it mean when a state's democratic presidential primary casts 40% of its votes for a felon incarcerated in another state? What's so bad about teaching by PowerPoint? What is truly the dirtiest word in America?These are just a few of the engaging and controversial issues that Michael Blumenthal, poet, novelist, essayist, and law professor, tackles in this collection of poignant essays commissioned by West Virginia Public Radio. In these brief essays, Blumenthal provides unconventional insights into our contemporary political, educational, and social systems, challenging us to look beyond the headlines to the psychological and sociological realities that underlie our conventional thinking. As a widely published poet and novelist, Blumenthal brings along a lawyer's analytical ability with his literary sensibility, effortlessly facilitating a distinction between the cliches of today's pallid political discourse and the deeper realities that lie beneath. This collection will captivate and provoke those with an interest in literature, politics, law, and the unwritten rules of our social and political engagements.

"The finest collection of poetry I've read in a very long time."--Ron HansenFrom my birth motherI took my melancholy dispositionand from my fatherthe ability to get through lifewith a bullet in one arm.--from "Genetics"No Hurry is a book of poems for the aging in body but youthful in spirit, for those interested in continuing to ask most meaningful questions as they head "downhill" What does it mean to be alive? What shall we make of this journey from birth to death? How can we find meaning and joy amid our mortality and suffering?

Through Michael Blumenthal's eyes we gain a renewed, childlike wonder at everything from plants, trees, and relationships to the most fundamental word in our vocabulary: AND. Blumenthal uses the conjunction to unify this collection and create a chanting, sonorous rhythm to his work. The result is a book of poems-as-hymns-and-praises.Michael Blumenthal holds the Mina Hohenberg Darden Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University. His other books include the memoir All My Mothers and Fathers (HarperCollins Publishers, 2002), and the poetry collection Dusty Angel (BOA Editions, Ltd., 1999), for which he was awarded the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award. Blumenthal's new collection of poems, titled "And," is the closest that the stoicism of Ecclesiastes will come to getting a 21st-century makeover. In it, there's a time to laugh and cry, scatter stones and gather them up, and all the rest. There's no point, though, in toil and hope beyond that. After reading these poems, which are designed with a cosmic sweep, you get the feeling that Blumenthal's plan is, as in Dylan Thomas's poem, eventually just to go gentle into that good night: "Rage, rage against the dying of the light" be damned.--THE JEWISH DAILY FORWARDMichael Blumenthal's stunning new book, And, is an Eliotic celebration of life in the world as continuum and progress. He achieves this through a simple and seductive meditation upon the conjunction, "and," and the way it enriches the complexity of language as it shapes lived experience.--The Montserrat Review

Weinstock Among the Dying is a tragi-comic study of one man's attempt to recover from the griefs of his childhood and to enter into a life-giving adulthood of fatherhood and mature love, In it, Michael Blumenthal creates a moving portrait of the human struggle for psychological growth, as well as a witty satire of life at the top of the academic world. The book - reprinted in paperback for the first time - won the 1994 Harold U. Ribalow Prize for Best Work of Jewish Fiction. Judges were Elie Wiesel, Thomas Keneally, and Merrill Joan Gerber.

In The Wages of Goodness Michael Blumenthal explores the costs and the wages of three ruling obsessions in our lives: love, grief, and virtue. Reacting to a tendency in contemporary poetry to avoid such "sentimental" and abstract notions as goodness, Blumenthal succeeds in making ideas live through the particulars of each poem.