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.

In an endeavor to find a fresh way into the scriptural text upon which I would be preaching, I began to develop an imaginary world populated primarily by wee folk. I found theythe characters I developed and the way that they evolved in my mind and on the pageserved me well as a consideration of how I sensed things happening in the scriptural text at hand. I want to make these stories and the world they represent newly available and so I bring them to book form fifty at a time. The cover drawing was done by Eve Sullivan, the authors granddaughter. The drawing is the artists conception of Carymba wading in the wash on the beach by the sea.