Falling from Heaven: Holocaust Poems of a Jew and a Gentile [Hardcover]

Louis Daniel Brodsky (Author), William Heyen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1991

Presenting fifty startling poems -- alternating between its authors, a Jew and a Christian -- this volume possesses a haunting poignancy unlike any other book of Holocaust poetry.

Editorial Reviews

Review

It has probably been thirty years since a book of poems has affected me the way this one has....Heyen and Brodsky tear the reader from abstractions to images which promise to sear, and to stay. --Four Quarters

Falling from Heaven is a painful and poignant offering which reminds me that none of us has survived the Holocaust without scars. Yet, the distinguished work of the poets gives us the hope...we can avoid a recurrence of such horror. --Maya Angelou, author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

About the Author

Brodsky is the author of fifty-five volumes of poetry (five of which have been published in French by Éditions Gallimard) and twenty-three volumes of prose, including nine books of scholarship on William Faulkner and seven books of short fictions. His poems and essays have appeared in Harper's, The Faulkner Review, Southern Review, Texas Quarterly, National Forum, American Scholar, Studies in Bibliography, Kansas Quarterly, Ball State University's Forum, Cimarron Review, and Literary Review, as well as in Ariel, Acumen, Orbis, New Welsh Review, Dalhousie Review, and other journals. His work has also been printed in five editions of the Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry.

William Heyen was born in 1940 in Brooklyn, New York. His undergraduate degree is from State University of New York at Brockport, where he is a professor of English and poet in residence; his graduate degrees are from Ohio University. A former senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature to Germany, he has been awarded two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize from Poetry magazine, and the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His writing has appeared in many periodicals, including American Poetry Review, Harper's, TriQuarterly, Ontario Review, The New Yorker, and The Southern Review, and in more than a hundred anthologies.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 109 pages
• Publisher: Time Being Books; 1st edition (June 1, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1877770167
• ISBN-13: 978-1877770166
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,759,859 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Louis Daniel Brodsky was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1941, where he attended St. Louis Country Day School. After earning a B.A., magna cum laude, at Yale University in 1963, he received an M.A. in English from Washington University in 1967 and an M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University the following year.

From 1968 to 1987, while continuing to write poetry, he assisted in managing a 350-person men's-clothing factory in Farmington, Missouri, and started one of the Midwest's first factory-outlet apparel chains. From 1980 to 1991, he taught English and creative writing, part-time, at Mineral Area Junior College, in nearby Flat River. Since 1987, he has lived in St. Louis and devoted himself to composing poems. He has a daughter and a son.

Brodsky is the author of seventy volumes of poetry (five of which have been published in French by Éditions Gallimard) and twenty-four volumes of prose, including nine books of scholarship on William Faulkner and nine books of short fictions. His poems and essays have appeared in Harper's, Faulkner Journal, Southern Review, Texas Quarterly, National Forum, American Scholar, Studies in Bibliography, Kansas Quarterly, Forum, Cimarron Review, and Literary Review, as well as in Ariel, Acumen, Orbis, New Welsh Review, Dalhousie Review, and other journals. His work has also been printed in five editions of the Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry.

In 2004, Brodsky's You Can't Go Back Exactly won the award for best book of poetry, presented by the Center for Great Lakes Culture, at Michigan State University.