Nobel Prize Laureate Joseph Brodsky is a key figure in Soviet Russian literature. Expelled from the USSR in 1972, he became a US citizen in 1977 and Poet Laureate of the United States in 1991. In this essay, I have sought to examine the state of exile perceived in Brodsky’s poems. Using Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization, I have strived to illuminate the formal composition of this state – its technique. This formalist approach, however, has one flaw: it fails to acknowledge the fact that the literature of exile, as pointed out by Edward Said, must never be reduced to mere ‘text’ in the narrow, technical sense. In consequence, the study of such literatures must seek to reconcile text and experience, literature and life. I thus hope that, while focusing mainly on the artistic creation of a state of exile within the text, this study may also shed some light on the extra-textual qualities of the literature of exile.