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.
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.
