Time Being Books: 60 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...

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 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,...

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...

Our Time continues the love passages begun in Just Ours, with sensuous poems describing the growing and deepening intimacy of two irrepressibly youthful lovers in the fullness of their years — a couple who revel in traveling, from their homes, in St. Louis, to Chicago, Florida, Laguna Beach, to celebrate...

In this fifth and concluding volume of The Seasons of Youth, Louis Daniel Brodsky celebrates his girl's and boy's passage into teenage years, his daughter progressing from age eleven to sixteen and his son from seven to thirteen. Both parents relive their own youths, as their children experience the...

"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 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."

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...

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,...

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...

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.

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...

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...