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Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad on May 24, 1940. He left school at the age of fifteen, taking jobs in a morgue, a mill, a ship's boiler room, and a geological expedition. During this time he taught himself English and Polish and began writing poetry. His first poems appeared mainly in Syntax, a Leningrad underground literary magazine. In 1964, he was tried and sentenced to five years of administrative exile for the charge of parasitism. As a result of intervention by prominent Soviet cultural figures, he was freed in 1965. In 1972, under tremendous pressure from the authorities, he emigrated to the United States. He wrote nine volumes of poetry and several collections of essays. His works include A Part of Speech, To Urania, Watermark, On Grief and Reason, So Forth, and Collected Poems in English. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987 and was named poet laureate of the United States, the first poet whose native language was not English to achieve this honor. He died of a heart attack on January 28, 1996. (Bowker Author Biography) — biography from Watermark… (more)
Watermark 608 copies, 12 reviews
Less Than One: Selected Essays 513 copies, 5 reviews
On grief and reason: essays 332 copies, 2 reviews
Collected Poems in English 306 copies, 2 reviews
A Part of Speech 199 copies, 1 review
To Urania: Poems 157 copies, 1 review
Nativity Poems 146 copies, 3 reviews
So Forth: Poems 119 copies, 3 reviews
Homage to Robert Frost (Contributor) 63 copies
Selected Poems 62 copies
Fuga da Bisanzio 42 copies, 1 review
Discovery 36 copies
Dall'esilio 20 copies
Fermata nel deserto 17 copies, 1 review
Torso gedichten 13 copies
Ex Ponto 12 copies
Profilo di Clio 10 copies
POEZIJA 8 copies
Koguja rõõm 7 copies
Collines, et autres poèmes 5 copies, 2 reviews
Gedichte. 4 copies
Conversazioni 3 copies
E così via 3 copies
Mein Ru©land in Gedichten (Contributor) 2 copies, 1 review
Gladiatorene 2 copies
Vodeni žig 2 copies
Холмы 1 copy
PAJ #54 1 copy
Etcétera 1 copy
The Foundation Pit (Preface, some editions) 742 copies, 14 reviews
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (Introduction, some editions) 686 copies, 12 reviews
Bad Trips (Contributor) 229 copies, 6 reviews
The Art of Losing (Contributor) 189 copies, 20 reviews
The Best American Poetry 1997 (Contributor) 165 copies
The Best American Essays 1995 (Contributor) 154 copies, 1 review
Granta 30: New Europe (Contributor) 146 copies, 2 reviews
The Best American Poetry 1992 (Contributor) 100 copies
The Penguin book of Russian poetry (Contributor) 85 copies
Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths (Contributor) 68 copies, 2 reviews
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Short biography
From Poets.org: Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad and left school at the age of 15, taking jobs in a morgue, a mill, a ship's boiler room, and a geological expedition. During this time, he taught himself English and Polish and began writing poetry. Brodsky was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972 after serving 18 months of a five-year sentence in a labor camp. According to Brodsky, literature turned his life around. "I was a normal Soviet boy," he said. "I could have become a man of the system. But something turned me upside down: [Fyodor Dostoevsky's] Notes from the Underground. I realized what I am. That I am bad." He moved to the USA, where he made homes in both Brooklyn and Massachusetts. His first book of poetry in English translation appeared in 1973. Celebrated as the greatest Russian poet of his generation, Brodsky authored nine volumes of poetry, as well as several collections of essays, and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987. In addition to teaching positions at Columbia University and Mount Holyoke College, where he taught for 15 years, Brodsky served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1991 to 1992. In 1993, he joined with Andrew Carroll to found the American Poetry & Literacy Project, a not-for-profit organization devoted to making poetry a more central part of American culture.

Joseph Brodsky was also a Russian nationalist with a loathing of Ukrainian independence. His On Ukrainian Independence (1992, unpublished) includes the lines 'Hurry back to your huts to be gang-banged by Krauts and Pollacks right in the guts' and 'When it's your turn to be dragged to graveyards, / You'll whisper and wheeze, your deathbed mattress a-pushing, / Not Shevchenko's bullshit but poetry from Pushkin'. (Alexander Pushkin and Taras Shevchenko, foundational poets of Russia and Ukraine respectively).
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Joseph Brodsky's book The Art of Losing was available from LibraryThing Early Reviewers.

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