The second volume in Louis Daniel Brodsky's Complete Poems series, covering his early years as a professional poet, from 1967-1976, contains more than eight hundred chronologically arranged pieces. This body of work shows Brodsky developing a number of artistic strategies to record the life he chose outside the realm of academia, which he abandoned after complete his master's degree in creative writing at San Francisco State University in 1968. --Time Being Books.

The third volume of The Complete Poems of Louis Daniel Brodsky presents over seven hundred poems, written from July 1976 through December 1980. By this period in his life, Brodsky had a wife and two children, a thriving business that kept him traveling, and a passion for acquiring Faulkneriana, sparked by his deep appreciation of the author's literature, that had led him on increasingly frequent journeys to Oxford, Mississippi, and elsewhere, to meet those who knew Faulkner and those who might supplement Brodsky's expanding collection. Spending considerably more time away from home than ever before, he began to compose most of his poems while driving, eating in small-town caf , staying in motels, and retreating to bars after twelve-hour workdays, always filling his omnipresent notebook with new images and metaphors. It was during these trips that Brodsky conceived many of his poetic personae: Willy Sypher, the Jewish ragman road peddler; a man who, though he lost no family in it, still feels he's a victim of the Holocaust; the Northern outlander, who appears in many of his "Southern" poems; the nature poet, who captures the beauty of rural America, and the cynical city poet, who observes its bigotry and vulgarity; and the unhappy family man, who feels he must escape home, for the freedom of the open road, but nevertheless suffers guilt and remorse. The poems from this segment of Brodsky's literary career reflect a man, in his mid and late thirties, facing growing desperation as he attempts to fulfill the complex responsibilities of his day-to-day commitments and yet address an unrelenting compulsion to record his frenetic life, in verse.

Tracing the days of the writer edging into middle age, the 888 poems presented in volume four of The Complete Poems of Louis Daniel Brodsky offer a glimpse into the frenzied life of a man compelled, by his discipline and inner passion, to capture the elements of his existence and explode them upon the page ... Startlingly honest and bristling with the energy of Brodsky's discontent, this book records the poet gaining momentum, as a writer, even as his personal life spirals out of control. --Time Being Books.

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 mantra/Which takes him away from himself,' and as we listen to the best poems here and observe 'toxic psychosis' that still desires a reason for being, we are appalled, complicit, nauseated, and gratefully ambivalent as we, by way of Brodsky's pounding and insistent voice, 'survive forgetting' to remember"--William Heyen.

In the small town of Lake Nebagamon, Wisconsin, Brodsky finds a full sense of love for the outdoors. He finds himself "Taking time to look and listen, see and hear." Poem after poem shares one man's alerted words for the American north country and for our journeying moods of mind and body, in this ever-changing natural world. AT WATER'S EDGE introduces us to Brodsky's own corner of nature and leaves us anticipating future visits, in the subsequent volumes of POEMS OF LAKE NEBAGAMON.

Fiction. Short Stories. Meet the ordinary people who inhabit Louis Daniel Brodsky's neighborhood. There's the young man who becomes a tree, and the one who, thanks to magical seeds, becomes who he is. There's the open-heart-surgery patient whose chest cavity becomes the trash receptacle for the operating team. And just what do all these characters have in common? They have one foot in the funny farm, and they're candidates for the butterfly net. In other words, like Brodsky himself, they're folks "with one foot in the butterfly farm."

In the seventy poems of Spirits of the Seasons, Louis Daniel Brodsky divides nature's cycles into narrative halves, tracing the winter slowing and spring burgeoning in and around Wisconsin's Lake Nebagamon.