Being Books: 62 books

Ever get so lonely that you dial your own phone number and leave yourself messages on your answering machine? Have you and your buddy ever dressed as Gandhi and Buddha, respectively, for Halloween, and proceeded to celebrate the day by trading insults? Have you and your attaché case become indistinguishable...

As the title of this collection suggests, the poems in Louis Daniel Brodsky’s Once upon a Small-Town Time have a soothing sort of lullaby quality characteristic of bedtime tales. Conceived as a metaphoric road trip through three Midwestern towns and across a quarter century, the poems are steeped in...

The third volume of THE SEASONS OF YOUTH celebrates the author's growing family, with the birth of a son. Father and mother revisit the daily joys and challenges of seeing a child flourish from infancy into the preschool years, while they marvel at their daughter's rapid physical and social development,...

In this book, Louis Daniel Brodsky proves to be not only a skilled poet but also a very sensitive contemporary Jew. Vividly portraying the inner turmoil and chutzpadik bravery of Abraham, he then traces the “Diaspora mentality” of Jews throughout our history. Periods of progress and persecution inform...

In this, Brodsky's first book of short fictions, you're likely to find yourself in absurdity's line of fire, the ammo consisting of an insurance agent, adept at selling policies covering impregnation by aliens; a milquetoast husband, whose nagging wife communicates with him via Post-it Note commands;...

In Forever, for Now, Mississippi River poet Louis Daniel Brodsky has written a Huckleberry Finn of latter-day love. Cutting loose from worlds that have gone dismally wrong — "desperate, desolate, defunct marriages" — the protagonist and his beloved Janie hide from the world aboard a raft for two,...

The forty-six poems in this book reveal the "fractured, disoriented soul" the poet became during his years as a factory manager, when frequent business travel forced him to "navigate the unmapped reaches of Catalepsy" and "pray for peace, guidance, delivery," leading him home, "after an eon on the road," to his beloved wife and child.

Taking the Back Road Home’s fifty-one poems detail the life of a poet, commemorating his day-to-day encounters with friends, family, neighbors, and coworkers, as he celebrates "the dedication of the self to useful occupations," as well as his more mystical experiences with his wife and with nature....

A Transcendental Almanac takes you through a one-year span of the seasons, inviting you to linger in each month’s four poems. Beginning in April, with nature exultantly proclaiming its freedom from hibernation, and ending, the following March, after the cyclical passing of summer, autumn, and winter,...

In this fifty-eight-poem collection, Brodsky examines the highs and lows authors experience as they practice their craft. Portraying everything from writer's block and the terror of the blank page to the overwhelming joy of finishing a work, The World Waiting To Be is both lamentation and love song to creative inspiration and the intersection of time and eternity, in the act of writing.

In the concluding volume of Louis Daniel Brodsky’s narrative trilogy about a Northerner’s personal odyssey in Faulkner’s Mississippi, the hypocrisy and bigotry of small-town Oxford, with its commercialization of Faulkner, exacerbate the main character’s disillusion, a malaise that ultimately...

Describing himself as midway through his "poet’s journey," Brodsky reaches deep into his heritage, in this volume of forty-seven chronologically arranged poems, aligning himself "with tillers of the tribe of Abraham" as he makes his way, alone, "toward the frontiers of verse," still knowing that "the Holy Land is just out of sight."

This book’s thirty-eight poems stitch Brodsky’s "awareness of days passing" into a crazy-quilt whose patches are the beautifully detailed memories captured from his daily life at home in Farmington, Missouri, his business trips throughout the Midwest, and his vacations to Fort Lauderdale, with his wife.

Tiffany Shade explores the poetic nature of life’s routines. With his detailed, imagistic depiction of both daily activities (making business trips, living in a small Midwestern town, settling into married life) and mystical events (contemplating imminent parenthood, celebrating holidays and birthdays),...