Being Books: 62 books

Poetry. What mom doesn't recall the magical seasons surrounding the birth of her baby--the anticipation felt during pregnancy; the pain and pride, on delivering; the joy of watching her child grow? And what dad can forget saying to himself, upon first holding his infant, "I'm really a father now," with...

The Eleventh Lost Tribe, Brodsky’s fourth book of poems devoted to the Holocaust, asks the reader to confront the dispossessed lives of ghetto dwellers, death-camp survivors, Jews prescient or desperate enough to have fled Europe prior to being captured and slaughtered, and, finally, children of the...

Poetry. Jewish Studies. "RABBI AUSCHWITZ is not so much a book about the historical Shoah as it is about the psyche of 'a Jew who died fifty years too soon' and who now considers his pen 'an oracular divining rod' that may or may not 'stave off spiritual asphyxia.' 'It's all about the darkness of the...

The Capital Cafe is a collection of forty-eight poems, in two sections, set in a bedroom community of St. Louis and in a Missouri farm town. The poems build on each other like chapters in an engrossing novel. The first half is a slice of life observed by Moe Fischer, formerly a high-school English teacher,...

When you enter L.D. Brodsky’s Catchin’ the Drift o’ the Draft, you find yourself in the surreal world of a master satirist. Imagine staring into a mirror and recognizing your reflection as that of a chimpanzee, before you swing to work on a vine, or consider the possibility that you and your spouse...

He's back -- L. D. Brodsky's working stiff from St. Louis, with his Bud Light-hued worldview and his uniquely foul-mouthed, malapropistic takes on modern life and his own tenuous place in it. This volume, the title of which is our unlikely hero's trademark interjection, brings together his narrations...

Brandishing the caustic wit that is the hallmark of his four previous books of short fictions, L. D. Brodsky gives "Xmas" an X rating in this latest volume, with his salty-tongued South St. Louis auto-assembly-line "rough," who gets way too far into the Christmas spirit(s). At least deserving of an R...

Poetry. The second and third years of a child's life are filled with the extraordinary ordinary events that are steppingstone rites of passage: learning to walk and speak; reveling in play and mischief; enduring the travails of illness; growing familiar with the world beyond the house, where dogs, rabbits,...

"The Talking Machine" and Other Poems provides startlingly clear glimpses into the author’s personal life, such as on "quiet Sundays . . . spent outside of time" with his wife, friends, and family, as well as his "6 a.m. to 9 p.m. existence" as a young salesman, including sharp details from his frequent business trips to small Midwestern outposts.

This sequel to Forever, for Now follows the second year of a romance between two middle-aged lovers, mixing erotic poems with those depicting memorable events they share (attending symphonies, going to the zoo, gardening, listening to jazz, traveling and sightseeing, celebrating holidays) as they journey...

Trip to Tipton and Other Compulsions, a volume of sixty-eight poems, records the unfolding events from one year of the author’s life, capturing special highlights (a trip to Europe with his wife, the celebration of their second wedding anniversary, their mystical visits to Wisconsin and Illinois) as...

In The Swastika Clock, Louis Daniel Brodsky writes the daily log of his passion, his anger, his desolation, his entrails-deep pain. In the ticking darkness of the Holocaust, in which we have lived, these past 70 years, and driven by his unremitting war against forgiveness and forgetting, he hurls rant...

This volume’s forty-seven poems trace Brodsky’s life as a road-poet and manager of outlet stores, during a time when he was "itinerant minister of surplus and flaw," traveling throughout the Midwest, "selling his soul wholesale," by day, and assuaging his loneliness, at night, with wine and music, while hiding himself away in hotel bars that might absorb him in their "dim-lit anonymity."

While Mein Kampf is about Adolf Hitler's struggle, Unser Kampf focuses on the victims' efforts to come to terms with the Holocaust — the genuine struggle survivors face, as they fight to understand what it means to have outlasted the Shoah , and the struggle endured by those who didn't live through...