blood-warm

I slept all day, face down in the pillow, a comfortable dead-man’s float only remotely disturbed by a chill undertow of reality—talk, footsteps, slamming doors—which threaded fitfully through the dark, blood-warm waters of dream.

When Laura looks into her daughter’s teenage eyes, Marie feels “that the price of her mom’s love, the blood-warm ocean she swam in constantly, was this kind of heightened surveillance of her feelings.”

“Slave Old Man” is a cloudburst of a novel, swift and compressed — but every page pulses, blood-warm.

For Homer, that person is Daniel Mendelsohn, and this blood-warm book.

The blood-warm seas of the Gulf of Mexico teem with life.