Sentiment and nostalgia are fatal for fiction. One must go into the territory of the imagination with sure feet, hot fainting with glorious misery.

What I am saying, I suppose, is that you write as if everyone is dead. Then you face the music. I don't know any other way to keep the teeth sharp and the spirit alive.

I wasn't put on this earth to be housekeeper to my own child or to anyone else for that matter.

Blumenthal goes straight to the heart in these poems. Gorgeously wrought, surprising, true, wise, elegiac, they leave me with a sense of having listened to Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus. Who could ask for more?

Sentiment and nostalgia are fatal for fiction. One must go into the territory of the imagination with sure feet, hot fainting with glorious misery.