Our newest offerings:

Hopgrassers and Flutterbies: Volume Four of The Seasons of Youth, by Louis Daniel Brodsky

In the fourth volume of the fivebook series The Seasons of Youth, Louis Daniel Brodsky traces the growth of his daughter, from ages six to eleven, and that of his son, from three to eight. His girl develops socially, attending her first sleepover and making friends with her classmates. She also matures emotionally, as evidenced during the mornings she shares with her father, who practices spelling with her, at home, and drives her to school, the two of them often sharing breakfast in one of their small town's cafés. His boy goes through phases of fascination — trains, airplanes, dinosaurs and whales — but finds his mother's avocations of drawing and painting to be his steady preoccupations, allowing him to give order to his ever-expanding world. And both kids begin coming to terms with their father's increasingly frequent business trips. Hopgrassers and Flutterbies is a touching universal portrait of a devoted, loving father and mother and their two flourishing children.

One Bird Falling, by CB Follett

The compassionate and penetrating poems in this collection focus on the natural, personal, and political. Of all the "steady and purposeful" birds that appear in One Bird Falling — ravens, doves, geese, meadowlarks, owls, vultures — the one that falls is never named but "[pulls] the sky after it," indicating "Something terrible / is coming and we pretend otherwise." The "we" of this and other poems is "far away . . . trying to do what's right" in a world controlled by what is invisible, wordless, and unpredictable as the wind.

In the poem "Belonging," Follett says, "the heart also has a brain." These poems address the heart's brain. They challenge the reader to open the heart's brain outwardly, to struggle with the incomprehensible mysteries of ordinary experience. Expect to read each of these poems more than once, and expect to be rewarded for doing so.

Saul and Charlotte: Poems Commemorating a Father and Mother, by Louis Daniel Brodsky

Saul and Charlotte: Poems Commemorating a Father and Mother is Louis Daniel Brodsky's tribute to his parents, who died almost nine years apart. It commends the beauty and laments the tribulations of their longevity. Though the poems deal with death's complexities, it is death itself that elicits Brodsky's reflections on hsi parents' lives — sensitive poems that neither dewell on sorrow and grief nor rely on sentimentality. This book's complementary parts, "Heavenward" and "Homeward," suggest that his father and mother are journeying to the same place, where they'll live together, forever, their love eternal.

The Swastika Clock: Holocaust Poems, by Louis Daniel Brodsky

InThe Swastika Clock, Louis Daniel Brodsky writes the daily log of his passion, his anger, his desolation, his entrails-deep pain. In the ticking darkness of the Holocaust, in which we have lived, these past 70 years, and driven by his unremitting war against forgiveness and forgetting, he hurls rant after rant at us, his amazed and chastened readers, giving full rein to his Diasporan anger over what was done to his people, the Jews of Europe, during the Shoah decade, when millions were not merely murdered but mortified to the quick, mutilated beyond recognition, massacred in nearly unimaginable ways.

Swimming in Moses' Well: Poems on Numbers, by Yakov Azriel

In Swimming in Moses' Well, the fourth in his series of verse commentaries on the Pentateuch, Yakov Azriel continues to build remarkable poems around biblical passages. In this volume, Azriel grapples with the book of Numbers, to see if his faith in the ancient story and in his relationship with the God who presided over it can survive under the breaking wave of the modern world. The powerfully tender poems in this collection link the ancient history of Israel with the current moment.

Now you can see and hear our sample poems!

When we opened our doors, twenty-three years ago, we envisioned Time Being Books as a publisher of poetry in sight and sound, offering our readers print as well as audio-cassette editions of our books. With the obsolescence of cassette recordings, our "sound" objective went by the way-side.

Until now.

We are excited to announce the addition of MP3 audio capability to our Web site, allowing readers to hear our sample poems, read by the authors, to get a better feel for the nuances of each poem.

We have just begun uploading MP3 files to our site, beginning with poems written by Louis Daniel Brodsky and Ben Milder, and it is our hope that we can include many author-read samples to our book pages, by the end of 2012.